(very) large nr of spam accounts created

[gavanderhoorn]

Just happened to take a look at answers.ros.org/users/?sort=newest. At least two ten thirty pages (~= 900 accounts) full of accounts registered in the past few days (I've seen accounts old as 2021-07-25) with nonsense bios full of links to external spam/advertising/phishing sites.

I saw some new accounts claiming to be from "the Netherlands", so I took a look. Nothing in those bios makes sense.

I've blocked & deleted a few, but there's too many.

Perhaps the admin can do this faster / easier.

[gavanderhoorn]

Example: kiaraather.

[evgenyfadeev]

@gavanderhoorn I will try to resolve this within a week.

[gavanderhoorn]

And they've started posting spam:

Account: florenestr.

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Edit: I've blocked the account and deleted the spam.

[evgenyfadeev]

I've found that Akismet was disabled, enabled it. Also I think I found a source of account spam (akismet not run on the user "about" section in one of the endpoints), will deliver this in ~3 days.

This will not reduce the number of the accounts created but should limit the spam posts.

I will research more on how to detect the spammers before they post anything using known spam databases etc.

[gavanderhoorn]

I've found that Akismet was disabled, enabled it.

I'm not sure what's going on, but I've received at least one feedback message from a user which can't post anything at all, even though he's been through the moderation queue already, and I'm personally unable to post any comments:

Maybe Akismet is a little too "triggerhappy".

[gavanderhoorn]

I'd probably suggest disabling Akismet for now.

[tfoote]

For the longer story about account profile spam see #141 We need a better automated solution, this is just accelerating.

I'm going to close this in favor of #141 with more information.