Donmai

Spam Bot

Posted under General

tapnek

SoulEvansEater said:

A lot of people have been suggesting a captcha, but they aren't nearly as effective as people think. They're frequently farmed out to sweatshops in third world countries to complete en-masse. If an attacker really wanted to register accounts, it would cost them a little money, but would be trivial to do.

Then how do you suggest that we make registration harder for spambots without compromising ease of use for legitimate users?

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Patina

tapnek said:

Then how do you suggest that we make registration harder for spambots without compromising ease of use for legitimate users?

Why not simply implement a minimum account age required to send messages as a stopgap measure? I moderated /r/hentai on reddit and we dealt with advertisement / spam bots by simply enforcing a 7 day minimum account age before they were allowed to contribute ANYTHING.

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kittey

PSYNtech said:

Why not simply implement a minimum account age required to send messages as a stopgap measure? I moderated /r/hentai on reddit and we dealt with advertisement / spam bots by simply enforcing a 7 day minimum account age before they were allowed to contribute ANYTHING.

That seems easily circumvented. Register account, wait seven days, spam a lot. This can be automated by simply saving the account creation time in a database and rotation accounts accordingly. I guess it did work for you, though, or you wouldn’t be mentioning it.

Edit: The alot is better than me at spelling.

Updated

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Patina

kittey said:

That seems easily circumvented. Register account, wait seven days, spam a lot. This can be automated by simply saving the account creation time in a database and rotation accounts accordingly. I guess it did work for you, though, or you wouldn’t be mentioning it.

Edit: The alot is better than me at spelling.

I mentioned in the post that it would be a stopgap measure. For us, it allowed us to immediately filter out content on a subreddit level until the bots were banned by reddit itself. It would give albert x number of days to work on a more permanent solution while keeping the bots in check.

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NWSiaCB

I remember that there was a similar complaint about someone making many sockpuppets to do edits. (And it wasn't even a spam bot attack, just a single user.) Having a one-week limit on using certain features isn't a significant threat, but it's at least a speedbump in the way of certain abusive users. At the very least, it requires abusive sockpuppet account makers to plan their attacks a week in advance, rather than just having a VPN allow them to make throw-away accounts on the spur of the moment.

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.grey

theadonicus said:

From the user page, hit the positive/negative/neutral link next to Feedback, then click New at the feedback page's menu bar. Mark it as a negative feedback and make sure to say it's spam in the body.

Member-level users aren't allowed to write user feedbacks. I'd say just contact a staff member and hope for the best.

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