@newsmast Okay I have maaaaaybe some info It’s a well...

@newsmast Okay I have maaaaaybe some info

It’s a well known issue on the internet that wherever there is a signup form, in time these will be flooded with ‘Vietnamese casino spam’ accounts. Things like ‘888’ and ‘bet’, ‘casino’ etc. Unfort captchas won’t work on these..

For years this has costs us a lot of work, just to delete them and check them. Somehow we need a way to check on username/display via regex or something to filter out those obvious spam accounts

Like 28 May at 13:45 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mstdn.social

7 comments

stux⚡

@newsmast in general these spam accounts are not super intrusive but the fact that they are there is enough for me

Personally I hate gambling and I think it causes a lot of suffering so I won’t stand for hosting such things, even though it’s automated and doesn’t do much

I’ve heard from many places around the web this is a common issue but often goes unnoticed

28 May at 13:46 | Open on mstdn.social

Newsmast

@stux

Hopefully it's something we can find a solution to!

We agree, they may not be super intrusive but they're not making anyones experience online better.

28 May at 14:24 | Open on newsmast.social

hybrid havoc

@stux @newsmast
As an admin of a small instance I've developed my own little python scripts, one of which looks at newly-learned accounts and tries to do some very rudimentary checks against them to detect potential spam.

I haven't looked at regexing the username / display name, but the next time there's a wave I become aware of I might try to come up with something to add to it.

28 May at 14:07 | Open on darkfriend.social

Newsmast

@hybridhavoc @stux

It's a really good idea! Something our team will have a look into too

28 May at 14:29 | Open on newsmast.social

stux⚡

@newsmast @hybridhavoc I guess such a script can also be ran when dealing with a spam wave indeed 💡 good point!

28 May at 14:32 | Open on mstdn.social

hybrid havoc

@stux @newsmast
My other script connects to the public stream and does a regex match on post content for every post that comes through. So if I become aware of a new pattern that can be reliably expressed through regex, I can add it to the list of patterns to check for. I wrote that up after the last wave, so haven't really gotten a good chance to see it in action yet.

28 May at 14:34 | Open on darkfriend.social

Greg Scallan :verified_red:

@hybridhavoc @stux @newsmast Happy to also help contribute wherever we can on flipboard.social. This has been an issue now for years on Flipboard. The source country seems to change every few years. We use a variety of ways to detect and automate removal or provide a slack message to moderators to make a decision (both regex like and machine learning) (like in the image below).

28 May at 18:54 | Open on flipboard.social