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Spam accounts on the forum - Printable Version +- Ludii Forum (https://ludii.games/forums) +-- Forum: Problems (https://ludii.games/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=5) +--- Forum: Forum Problems (https://ludii.games/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=9) +--- Thread: Spam accounts on the forum (/showthread.php?tid=1412) |
Spam accounts on the forum - fbarbe - 12-23-2022 Hi, I was looking at the forum today and noticed a spam post on the announcement. The "report post" button does not seem to work. I was curious to see how many spam accounts there are on the forum, so I wrote a small python scraper that looks at the latest accounts and looks for the word "escort". For the last 500 accounts, I found 51 (!!!) profiles with that word in their bio. Are you aware that around 10% of new profiles seem to be spam? I can keep running my small scraper, but I suspect that: 1. it goes against the rules of this website, 2. it's not the most effective way to do it. Below you'll find the list of these 51 spam profiles. Quote:https://ludii.games/forums/member.php?action=profile&uid=2737 Let me know if you'd like me to share the script. The reports.php endpoint doesn't seem to work. Happy holidays :), Fabio There seem to be a lot more than just "escort" accounts (really hope my account won't get banned by a future strict filtering because I wrote this word ;)). A lot of profiles seem to be promoting their business: https://ludii.games/forums/member.php?action=profile&uid=2599 (note also that account info and image do not match). There's models trained to detect such spam text, I'm really tempted to run one of those. I'm just currently afraid to get my IP blacklisted for too many requests RE: Spam accounts on the forum - Eric Piette - 12-23-2022 Hi, Yes, I am aware that we have a lot of spammers or bots. I am removing most of their spam posts every day. However, I do not remove the fake account which are inactive. Unfortunately, because of the UM policy rules, we can not avoid these accounts to be created. If you have any idea in mind which could help, feel free to share them with Cameron, this would improve the forum :) Happy holidays to you too :) Eric RE: Spam accounts on the forum - fbarbe - 12-23-2022 Hi Eric, Thank you for your response. The easier way would definitely be to have some sort of Captcha when creating an account, but if that's not an option, it should be fairly easy to identify fake accounts based on the description. Here's a list of 436 spam more than one hundred account ids. (edit: remove duplicate) Quote:2688 @Cameron if you're reading this, I'd love to help identifying these accounts. You can send me an email or I'll come by your office after the holidays :). btw, I know I didn't use the word "spam" correctly, as these accounts don't actually spam forum posts. But I am guessing they are still undesired accounts. Best, Fabio RE: Spam accounts on the forum - fbarbe - 12-23-2022 Update: an easy way to identify unwanted accounts are accounted that have a Time Spent Online: None Registered. I believe this is because their account creation is automated with a bot, and no new user would have that value set to zero if they signed up properly (to check). Hope it helps RE: Spam accounts on the forum - Eric Piette - 12-23-2022 Hi, Thanks for this. Matthew managed all the aspects of the forum before to leave the project and as far as I know, yes a captcha was not an option because of the UM security policy. However, we have an admin option to purge any user, so I assume that having an admin script to purge all the ids of the users you can detect, would be useful :) Edit: I purged all the users in your list. Also, your list was fulled of duplicate ;) So that was a lot less than ~400. If you have a script to generate this list, this can also be useful ;) Thanks! Eric RE: Spam accounts on the forum - fbarbe - 12-23-2022 Hi Eric, yes, sorry for all the duplicates... there was indeed a big overlap in the search. I ran my script again, this time without duplicates. I have a list of 656 unique accounts that: - have a link in their bio or as their homepage - have their last visit date equal to their Registration date Is this enough to decide whether an account is undesired? Well, I went through a lot of them and that seems to be the case. But there are a few edges cases, such as this one: https://ludii.games/forums/member.php?action=profile&uid=118 . This seems to be a legitimate user, except they only spent 1min on the forum and used it to advertise their blog. A lot of these accounts seem to just put different linkts in there, perhaps to boost their SEO ranking? Like this one: https://ludii.games/forums/member.php?action=profile&uid=230 I don't know if it's appropriate to paste this list here as some of these accounts might be legitimate. We can perhaps first talk about it in person after the holidays. Best, Fabio RE: Spam accounts on the forum - Eric Piette - 12-24-2022 Hi, I purged all the users which were probably bots or spammers. If you run your script, you should have a lot less or none :) Let me know when you can :) Eric RE: Spam accounts on the forum - fbarbe - 12-25-2022 Hi, wow, I could only find a few left. Great job! Here's a few more: Quote:https://ludii.games/forums/member.php?action=profile&uid=2760 Best, Fabio |