Haycat2009 wrote: October 31st, 2024, 10:08 pm
I think that something should be done, as there have been 13 accounts made, only one of which is genuine.
Nathaniel has been aware of the issue since these types of spammer accounts first started getting created. His latest response was
... for now I'll just keep an eye on it. Honestly I'm not sure what next steps to take to prevent spam on the wiki beyond just locking down account creation entirely (i.e., requiring users to request a trusted flag *before* creating a wiki account, which I could do, but don't particularly want to do).
It would be nice if there was something obvious that could be done -- find the programmer that wrote the silly spambot that is pointlessly creating all of these accounts, and maybe smack them with a rolled-up newspaper or something.
However, it looks fairly likely to me that each new round of pointless account creation is actually a new spammer who has purchased the spambot and is telling it to generate spamvertisements all across the Internet. They're not going to succeed in creating any spamvertisements on the LifeWiki, because they're not going to get trusted even if one of them finds their way to the forum thread and asks.
The thing is, very likely none of them even
notices that they're being blocked from spamming the LifeWiki -- because the LifeWiki is just one of dozens or hundreds of wikis that have enough protections set up to keep them out. The spambot will simultaneously be succeeding in dozens or hundreds of other places, and reporting back to the spammer about those successes.
Meanwhile, we see the accumulated litter of new accounts from the spambot's failed attempts. Try not to worry about it. It's annoying, but really fairly harmless. If we need to take further steps, we will, but at the moment the cure would be worse than the disease.
