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Toot.Cat News @news

I'm noticing a suspiciously large number of new signups with names that look like they were generated by an algorithm.

Can the new folks within the past 48 hours or so please introduce themselves? Thanks!

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Other admins: is anyone else seeing a recent bout of of signups with oddly-consistent random combinations of phonemes, all within the past 24-48 hours?

@woozle yeah I've been reporting them all day on social but idk if anything's been done yet

they keep linking to what appear to be bootleg video sharing sites / hosting sites but i'm def not clicking those links.

@ryanlittlefield
I haven't seen any posting activity at all yet; I would probably have suspended for just posting a link and nothing else.

@woozle if you want to see an example, @stuarabinta has one up. these have been coming to social for at least the majority of today.

@ryanlittlefield I rechecked just now, and three of them have tooted spam just like that.

I'll keep rechecking and suspending.

@woozle Yes, there is a flood of new registrations all over the place.

c/ @gled

@kemonine @woozle

You can refer to those if you want to block:
mastodon.host/@gled/1000749191

The iptable list allows you to prevent that isp from reaching your instance, while the whois check is specific to the spammer.

If you want to block with the ruby console:
naughty_list.each { |ip| User.where("last_sign_in_ip << ?", ip).each { |u| puts u.account.username; u.account.suspended = true; u.account.save!; u.save! } }; 0

@gled @woozle This would be one of those times self-hosting would be handy 😢
@woozle @gled 2 of my instances are hosted through masto.host...

I'm going to be reaching out to hugo soon

NOTICE TO RECENT SIGNUPS: I'm going to give new accounts a minimum of 24 hours to show some signs of not being bots, and then suspend any that seem unlikely to be anything else.

So, as I said earlier: at least say hi or something. Give me something checkable in your profile. Do something non-botlike. If you're not sure, ask me and I'll personally give you a short Turing test.

Thanks again.

@news Thanks for keeping on top of these sorts of things! Ugh, it's no fun moderating a community when spammers start showing up. 😥

Is it useful to you for people to file reports on accounts that are obviously posting spam? You'd probably see them in the local timeline anyway, so I'm guessing reports are redundant, but thought I'd check.

@news have a look at mastodon.at/@pfigel/1000743220 - it could help blocking some IPs temporarily as well :)