Table:Outburst of fake user accounts

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Revision as of 00:33, 23 October 2012 by Kif (talk | contribs)
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Discussion

Lately, there have been more and more fake user accounts being created. In the time I've been here (since late April), it's gone from something that happens about once a day to something that happens every few minutes. Is there any way to prevent this? For example, maybe all of these user accounts are coming from one I.P. address, and we could block that I.P. address if that's the case. (I have no idea how to do this, so someone else has to.) Kif (talk) 02:16, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

This is what was done last time. We could block ^[a-zA-Z]{5,6}[0-9]{3}$, but they'll probably just move to a new combination. I think the robot detection needs re-adjusting. "Are you human?" is still in there for a start and the other ones may now be in the bot's script. Suggested questions: "Who is the first main character to appear in the pilot?" "What is the Professor's first name?" "The start/end of the pilot episode took place in which year?" - Quolnok (talk) 03:28, 20 September 2012 (CEST)
Actually, that regex should be covered be the previous block, and there's already more variants... - Quolnok (talk) 03:31, 20 September 2012 (CEST)
Well, I ran removeUnusedAccounts.php, tweaked the value to 15 days. This means that any account that has never made an edit, had a page deleted or appeared in any log (other than user creation log, obviously) and hasn't been online in 15 days were deleted.
We might have hit some legitimate accounts that someone might have needed to change some preferences or something, but never actually got around to edit, seeing as it deleted 700 accounts. Anyway, I can't really worry about that, people can re-register and protect their account by making one edit. --Sviptalk 16:06, 20 September 2012 (CEST)
That does make sense. I think we should add the new questions, with the exception of the last one, since someone who isn't too familiar with Futurama yet might not know that. Kif (talk) 00:49, 22 September 2012 (CEST)
They could also be common-sense questions that aren't Futurama-centric, like "What color is the sky?" or "how many wheels does a car have?" --Buddy (talk) 11:52, 26 September 2012 (CEST)

Whoever it is, it's happening again. I started blocking them for "Abusing multiple accounts" but it sounds like that might interfere with your bot (since it would put them on the block log), so I'll stop further blocking. Do we have any idea where they're coming from? Or what their purpose is? What could they possibly want? --Buddy (talk) 11:49, 26 September 2012 (CEST)

Clearly, whatever we're doing isn't working. There's dozens more. Does wikimedia not support regular old Captcha? It's getting tarded... --Buddy (talk) 11:09, 15 October 2012 (CEST)

Isn't there some way we can block whatever I.P. address they're coming from? Kif (talk) 00:50, 16 October 2012 (CEST)

Okay, it happened literally every 5 minutes today. Something has to be done about this! Kif (talk) 01:33, 23 October 2012 (CEST)