It seems there is a bot on reddcoin talk creating random user accounts

admins: please take a look at https://www.reddcointalk.org/users/latest

There is a pattern in usernames like:

ldxzlijc86
yiabprjd78
vsqjzivu47
iswyxiyc66
ayaazyyp46
ficuujpe53
kzqiavik43kzcydryz03
tafcljzc69gnyjghvz91
trpzqnrq67yiocefuz98
njjavxfm17

90% of the latest users have generated usernames like that

they always have 8 lowercase alphabetic characters and 2 numeric or 2x 8+2 in the username and 0 posts. a very obvious one :smiley:

ReddcoinRocks nice detective work. seems like you got a little free time (;

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iisurge you got me :smiley: I think the admins can just do a delete on the user db and check for username==(?:[a-z]{8}[0-9]{2})+ and posts==0

ReddcoinRocks I dont trust deleting with querys anymore… I deleted 90% of one of my databases recently because it decided it didnt care about my “WHERE” part

iisurge haha yeah, that’s one of the moments when you click the button and realize in the same second that… oh no!
but what I have learned from that: always use transactions if you are working on a live db! http://www.tutorialspoint.com/sql/sql-transactions.htm

Careful because there are some people that are in the middle…

Oliver you’re right and that’s why I limited the suggested query to usernames where the characters are (8 alphabetic lowercase chars + 2 numeric)*X and the post count is zero. I think that is the safest query to do an automated delete on a huge amount of autogenerated data. but if most of them have the same IP Address that might be another good way to limit the result. I’m also sure the admins won’t do anything that harms “real” user accounts. :slight_smile:

// EDIT: I think there is also the need to add a captcha to the registration process to avoid this in the future. It is quite interesting that some people are investing the time to create downvote bots on reddit and bots that create user accounts on reddcointalk now. they must be very scared of the vision and pace of the reddcoin project.

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ReddcoinRocks important to note that this form wasnt built by devs, and its built on node. Look up nodeBB on github

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iisurge good point. this might be a quick win: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-plugin-spam-be-gone

ReddcoinRocks I believe the askimet thing is already enabled here so shouldnt be to hard for them. Lol It tried to mark my reddcoin.conf post as spam with the askimet thing

I noticed this earlier but didn’t want to start a whole “reddit” issue again. I meant to Pm a mod earlier but forgot XD

looking through registered accounts it looks to be around 150 accounts
strange thing is it seems to generate some wait days and then do more

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BrownSlaughter It was good to have some cooldown time to get some distance to all this reddit madness. I just read that you left reddit and removed your bot and I really can understand this decision. It’s just tiring to do objective discussions in such an aggressive atmosphere.

iisurge intersting, it seems they haven’t activated the captcha option

BrownSlaughter Same here but I’m glad it’s out in the open now.

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I’m a little confused, why would there be a bot doing this? Is it just to make the community seem like it is bigger than it is? And is this what happened on reddit? (I must admit I totally thought reddit subscribers were real -_-)

Because haters can’t use the reddit and bitcointalk forums anymore to shill. On the other side, retreating from there might have actually encouraged them. It’s important to maintain a cool head and don’t let them get under your skin.

A lot of these bots just crawl random pages looking for familiar looking form fields that they can submit - I sort of doubt the registrations are malicious. The registration form should probably have some kind of email verify (or at least captcha).

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What do people gain from these bots/new users?

they are probably spider bots crawling for info, just need to enable captcha for registrations

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m3ndi3 someone bought subscribers on the reddit to make the community look bigger than it was