Are the spammers getting tired or something?

[classicdrogn]

Maybe we got slashdotted somewhere? A fic rec maybe. Or Q has swet a bounty on finding anti-Trumpists or something.

[robkelk]

The most users online at one time was 910 on 2024-11-12 at 14:48

What happened on the day after Remembrance Day? (We might never know...)

The hell with that... what happened five hours ago?

The most users online at one time was 1,192 on Today at 08:54 AM

(UTC time.)

As of this posting, there were "3,587 users active in the past 15 minutes (1 member, 0 of whom are invisible, and 3,584 guests)."

Also, "The most users online at one time was 9,494 on 2025-01-05 at 15:55"

That's an entire order of magnitude increase in the last two months. Somebody has noticed us.

[Bob Schroeck]

Holy cow, how did I miss that for the last two weeks?

EDIT: Oddly, the number of membership requests from spammers hasn't increased proportionally, although there is one particular one -- at least as far as I can tell from the domain in the email addresses used -- that recently just won't give up, submitting a new request every week or two.

[Cobalt Greywalker]

Still climbing.

The most users online at one time was 10,068 on Today at 05:35 AM

[classicdrogn]

... I guess it's a good thing the forum isn 't still on the "X views per month, yjen pay nore" plan of EZBoard, then. At least, I think that was how it used to work... ISTR something like thatr, any road.

[Bob Schroeck]

It was straight pageviews, IIRC -- something like $50 for 25,000. Yeah, I'm very glad those days are gone.

Ten thousand hits in one day. Damn. If only the KanriKyara AO3 page was doing so well...

[Bob Schroeck]

The one that won't give up didn't give up again last night. Like I said, though, the email address always has the same domain -- an apparently deliberate misspelling of "minecraft" -- so since the first few I don't even have to do the usual IP lookup. It's so predictable that if I could script membership approvals I could put him on autodeny.

[Bob Schroeck]

Really, guys? An email address with the domain "fast-email.lol"? You're not even trying here. Put in a little effort and pretend to be legit.

[Norgarth]

The sad part is that there probably still people that fall for it.

[classicdrogn]

I must confess that I find the idea of an address from that domain appealing out of a similar amusement factor as I once signed up for one at smackdown.com and used it as my main account until whatever entertainment conglomerate owns the WWE wrestling franchise litigated it into being shut down.

[Bob Schroeck]

Hm. Three spammers got as far as account approval in the last 24 hours. I guess it's finally time to change my security questions, preferably to something an AI can't have easily scraped up somewhere else.

EDIT: Well, I guess "too many" is entirely relative... The page for security questions in the Admin control panel displays statistics, and, well, the original questions had 20-23,000 views each, and the ones which let the most applicants through had no more than 120 correct answers. (And the bots didn't even try to answer them on almost all of the remaining views.) So honestly, my security questions have been doing their job extraordinarily well. Just not quite as well recently. But I decided to change things up anyway, deleting questions that let more than 70 applicants through over the past few years, and creating a dozen or so new questions. And under the assumption that the spammers have been using AI to get around the security questions, I went to ChatGPT and worked with it to come up with questions it would have a hard time answering. I think I have a pretty good bunch now. <grin>

[Vulpis]

The one that won't give up didn't give up again last night.  Like I said, though, the email address always has the same domain -- an apparently deliberate misspelling of "minecraft" -- so since the first few I don't even have to do the usual IP lookup.  It's so predictable that if I could script membership approvals I could put him on autodeny.

A bit late for me to be commenting it, and I expect too late for it to actually be relevant, but I do wonder if the misspelling in question was 'mincecraft', because that *specific* misspelling is an in-joke in the game itself (or at least the title screen).

[Bob Schroeck]

No, it's "minecrafgt" or something like that.