Reporting spam github users

[sdball]

Is there an official way to report github users that are clearly just spam accounts?

e.g. https://github.com/StevenGerrard

[holman]

Yeah, hit the "report abuse" link in the upper right:

[gregmalcolm]

How about scenarios where its a swarm of users rather than just one?

In the last month I've become a bot magnet. I'm pretty sure most of 95% of followers in my current latest follows page are generated accounts:

https://github.com/gregmalcolm/followers

[holman]

Ooooh! Nice. I'll float that by someone specifically.

[holman]

I mean "nice!" in that it lets us refine our spam tools a bunch, not "nice" as in "spam followers are awesome!" :)

[gregmalcolm]

Heh, cool!

Btw, theres also a bunch of spambots hiding in my "python_koans" stargazers list too. They were probably attracted by too much bacon in the unit tests...

[bootchk]

I have the same experience, especially in the last month or so.

IMHO github needs to filter spam or troll users. It ruins any social experience, because I will stop examining what other users are doing, when most of them are spam users. And these users are forking too. It is discomforting to think that github has lax security. For all I know, spam users are forking my binaries, injecting viruses, and directing others to download them.

[holman]

IMHO github needs to filter spam or troll users.

We do a ton of spam filtering. You probably only see like 5% of what actually happens on the site. The real hard problem is reducing that number even more, which we're actively working on.

[bootchk]

I see a TON of spam. Only 5% of my followers are real.

The solution you advise above (Report Abuse) is too much work (on email spam, I just have to push a button, I don't have to fill out a text field describing the problem.)

It looks easy to me: the spammers have joined recently, they use the default avatar, they have no activity, they have no repositories that are roots (they are all forked, and probably have no commits in the fork.)

I do have sympathy: its probably one real hacker/phreak doing this to you, and very hard to track down.

[wadewilliams]

@holman maybe edit your image above with the one from #590 as this issue does have a A+ page rank for "github report spam"

[Andersos]

@wadewilliams How do you figure out the grade of a page in page rank?

[wadewilliams]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=github+report+spam&l=1 ... this page is #1 hit