Whats with all these new jellies that instantly can't be found, and do you want us flagging them if they can be found?
New jellies appear on the community page but they don’t really exist. What’s up?
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43 Answers
We’re in the middle of a massive spam attack and trying to keep it at bay.
If their profile’s gone by the time you click it, it means we caught it. If you can see their profile and it looks questionable, please flag it.
That’s what I figured. Anything we can do?
Just flag what you can, and be patient if the servers are slow. Thanks for asking!
OMG!!! IT’S THE END OF FLUTHER!!!
Close to 1500 spam accounts created in the past 5½ hours. Insanity.
@hearkat You guys did an amazing job. Our thanks go out to all of you.
@thorninmud was the one who caught it and managed to nip most of it in the bud, thankfully!
Huzzah for thorny!!
Good job thorny! They just kept coming. I saw the spam names but by the time I got to them, they were gone. Nice work.
They can be spammers, or they can be some new jellies who know they can’t fit here the moment they join (I’ve seen one, and sadly that one left with an attack) :p
Yesterday I noticed that there was so much spam that some of them were starting to show on the Community feed. I figured it must be out of control.
Moddy thanks.
1500? Holy crap that’s an awful lot of spam.
Great job, Thorny and all you mods. You really do have your hands full.
Good on all of you.
They’re still flowing in – it comes in waves.
I can see @thorninmud in the mansion kitchen making spam sushi out of all of ‘em. Good job, Sir.
Why not just turn off new user registrations until they give up and focus their bots on another target. That is a lot of work to just accommodate a few new (legit) users that will probably only be here a day.
If you are getting 1500 in 5.5 hours it is automated. Find a way to break the script they are using. Like changing ID’s and Classes and toss in a few hidden elements to break their script.
It looks like Ben managed to squelch it. It’s been quiet for a couple hours now, thankfully.
Maybe there should be a requirement, like making it mandatory that a new user needs to ask or answer at least one post within a certain time frame or their profile would automatically be deleted. I’m not sure if this is feasible, but if it is, I think it would help to combat these phony profiles, or at least draw the attention of the mods to those ‘users’ to view what they’re actually posting much quicker. If someone joins this site, but doesn’t post nothing then I find that it’s a good reason to be suspicious of them.
@Paradox25 There are a lot of people who frequent sites like this just because they’re shy. Requiring someone to post could be a problem for them.
Shy people just lurk. Why bother making a account you don’t want to post something?
@johnpowell Well, they may just lurk until they see something they really have to answer. Beside, an account is the only way to access the chatroom. Some people may want to use the chatroom, so they may create an account.
Or maybe the person who signs up just doesn’t have much time the day they joins. They goes away, then comes back. If that kind of requirement is in effect, they find the account deleted. So frustrating :P
@Paradox25 If someone joins this site, but doesn’t post nothing then I find that it’s a good reason to be suspicious of them.
Err… anyone who joins and post nothing are suspicious? I sometimes sign up on forums (because some features are only available for members) and post nothing, so I look suspicious on those forums?
Yes, you look suspicious. Your IP being from Vietnam doesn’t help since that is kinda the hub of spam.
And there is maybe one (stig) users of the chatroom that have have never commented on the main site.
Really, until you run a site that anyone can join and spam you have no idea what a mess the problem is. My tiny little forum had to go as far as banning all IP’s from Asia and Russia since 100% of it was spam.
I was getting about 200 fake profiles a day on a site that has 1/1000th the traffic Fluther does. Since banning Asia it is now one or two a day. And I use a Captcha to register.
I have a theory. The bots have beat the Captcha. In fact that is almost certain. Second is why so many from Asia? I chalk that up to using older copies of Windows XP that were pirated and haven’t gotten security updates in years. Asia is a huge botnet so I block them at the .htaccess level so I don’t waste the CPU cycles of the PHP interpreter dealing with the requests. .
@johnpowell Never known my IP location is one big spam hub… I do see some spammers from Vietnam from time to time but that is new to me.
Guess I looked suspicious to all of you the day I first joined, especially if I hadn’t asked or answered anything :P
Well, it seems like another blanket attack is underway. I flagged a whack of them, but my fingers can’t keep up. They must have some way of automating the process of signing up.
Fucking Hell
This is absurd..
Edit :: And 60 seconds later
The mods should stop playing whack-a-mole. This is Ben’s problem. This problem needs to be solved with code.
@Mimishu1995 Most of the Asian accounts have a mishmash of letters for the name. You couldn’t pronounce those names if your life depended on it. We can pronounce yours, so you don’t look spammy to me.
@Mimishu1995 I know you are a troll and a spammer, and the source of all of fluther’s recent problems. I will hunt you to the end of the world…. :)
@Mimishu1995 Here, come hang out with me. I’ll get a guard dog and fend him off with a rake!
@snowberry Ha, dogs love me, and I have firearms. I’ll make short work of you.
@johnpowell Yeah, the only way to stop automated spamming is with automated rejections. There must be a way to add a level to the signup process that would stop this cold. Or something obvious like a captcha.
@johnpowell I understand CAPTCHA has been improved. Have all the newest versions of CAPTCHA been defeated already?
Recaptcha is pretty much defeated.
They would be better off doing 4 + 6 = ?. You would have to program that in.
~Perhaps we could administer a spelling and grammar test for new members.~
The bots couldn’t pass if we post a quiz with multiple sentences and the wanna-be user has to chose which one is or is not grammatically correct. Or they would have to type a corrected version of a poorly phrased question. I think it would be more appropriate than a math test like JP proposes, and would allow is to pre-screen the humans, too!~
@hearkat Sure, but we’d lose a quarter of the (non-bot) Fluther population that way.
I hope people realize I’m joking! We’d grandfather the people who are already here, of course!
@hearkat Great, now you’re introducing gender discrimination!
Great, they’re still at it. :(
Ben got the custom captcha working and that seems t be holding them off for now.
So that’s why I don’t see spammers much for a while…
This could be a time when the Vampire Family could assist the “Mods.” An equal cooperation within the two ranks would deem itself extremely helpful.
Mastema dear…would you be so kind to hunt down those whom may cause harm here?
Give them all to me. Let’s go!
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