Author Topic: Lots of spambot accounts?  (Read 27691 times)

Indirik

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #30: August 10, 2012, 04:44:32 PM »
OK, so, I'm not 100% sure how to do this, or what we should be using to try to block the spambot accounts, without unnecessarily also blocking potential real users.

The spambot accounts seem to have at least one number in the username. Usually more than one, but not always. Here's the account creation log:
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Special:Log/newusers

Anything on there that I would consider a valid user, i.e. anything with at least one successful non-spammy edit, never even uses a single number in the username. Do we just disallow any new accounts that use a number anywhere in the username? I know that we have in the past had a couple valid users with numbers in their username. According to the activity log, we have four who have been active in the last 30 days, two of whom have usernames ending in multiple numbers.  (Antix1994 and Madmonk77)

We can make a note on the account creation page that certain patterns are not allowed, such as ending in numbers at all, or even go so far as to disallow all numbers in usernames for new accounts only. This would not affect any existing accounts in any way. We would just need to accept that this may affect the future registration of valid users. But it would drop our spambot account signups by about 90%.

Opinions?

Also, anyone with good regex knowledge want to look at the TitleBlacklist page and see if you can figure out their syntax? It looks to me like blocking useraccounts does something like:
.*(insertpatternhere).* <newaccountonly>
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