Published by KermMartian 17 years, 4 months ago (2006-12-01T13:26:22+00:00) | Discuss this article

I've noticed a sharp uptick in the number of news users registering per day in the last week and a half - from about one user every two days to over thirty or forty new users per day. Clearly, spambots were to blame; we got up to over 800 users, but I just deleted roughly 400 bot accounts, making the total user count a bit more accurate at 409 users. I shall probably be carrying out this process more regularly, and perhaps implementing some more anti-bot measures. Among the patterns I noticed were that many bots register with a first and last name separated by a space, and most fill out the interests and website url part of the profile but nothing else. I'm considering a system to weigh the overall danger it sees in each new user and suspend suspected new accounts. This would allow an admin to review and delete or unsuspend the suspected accounts. Feedback is, as always, appreciated in the accompanying discussion topic.

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