New User Flood

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Revision as of 1 October 2014 at 18:48.
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New User Flood

There seems to be a flood of new users, I can only guess that these are not people interested in robocode, but rather some kind of spam bot (or spam bots). We need some way to captcha user creation I think.

While we are at it, remove some of those "new users" without any edits.

    Chase15:07, 30 September 2014

    I wonder why create spam bots when you can create Robocode bots. :P

      MN (talk)00:30, 1 October 2014
       

      Speaking of user removal. How many active admins do we have?

        Beaming (talk)01:57, 1 October 2014

        Well a few, for example I don't have access to actual site stuff (so I can't add a captcha).

        We could just go through and manually delete them all, but there is no bulk method way to do that (that I know of).

          Chase02:20, 1 October 2014
           

          Hate to break it to you Chase, but we already have a captcha on user creation. In fact, we have *TWO* captchas (reCaptcha, plus a simple math question presented as an image) required for user creation, and the bots involved in these user creations seem to crack crack both. I tend to wonder if they're using a "mechanical turk" type of system to outsource bulk captcha breaking to humans.

          Only reason they very rarely succeed at actually posting content these days, is because of a custom Mediawiki I added, which blocks any edits which add new external URL links if the user account was created within X hours of the attempt. (Note, it does not block external URLs that are not formatted as Mediawiki links, such as the participants page of course)

          Perhaps I should augment this extension to remove users whose only attempted edits during a 1 week period were blocked in this fashion?

            Rednaxela (talk)19:48, 1 October 2014