Spam users

http://drupal.org/user/297666 - profile cleansed, user blocked
http://drupal.org/user/263691 - profile cleansed, user blocked
http://drupal.org/user/291487 - profile cleansed, user blocked
http://drupal.org/user/268899 - profile cleansed, user blocked
http://drupal.org/user/268893 - profile cleansed, user blocked
http://drupal.org/user/268896 - profile cleansed, user blocked

Leaving this open to allow other eyes to take a look.

profiles cleansed - users blocked

Would anybody mind if I blocked the "interest" profile pages in robots.txt? Might make it less interesting to spam d.o.

I'd so like to disable gmail.com as an email domain on d.o. 97% of all spammers that I blocked last week had a gmail.com address. Unfortunately, this would also affect existing accounts.

I don't think it was a serious suggestion, but I'm definitely -1 to blocking gmail.com. As an example, my account is registered to a gmail.com domain. Although I agree it would solve a lot of problems, it would also be blocking what is arguably the most popular email host for legitimate users. I think the thing to do is to disable being able to register using the email+morestuff@gmail.com format to register d.o accounts. Additionally, we should consider using mollom or some other blackbox spam filtering software. I think the combination of the google captcha system(when registering gmail accounts), the disabling of plus addressing, and better filtering on d.o would help us see a reduction in spam registrations.

The suggestion was half-serious at least, I am quite annoyed. If I hd a way to not let it affect existing accounts, I'd implement it right now, followed by an open letter to google.

Blocking mail addresses using + notation would have avoided only about 30% of the spammy accounts.

Using some captcha before registration seems like a good idea, however, the spammers have already defeated google's captchas in creating the mail accounts, so I am quite sure they'll also defy ours.

I had also suggested to use some blocklist to check the urls that the spammers enter, hoever, when I manually checked some of the URLs, I didn't find all of them in the blocklists I looked at. Maybe I'd need to look at other blocklists.

I am not sure that mollom or a similar service would be able to filter the domains accurately either.

I know category spam is only one type of spam we get, but what about the idea of having 'honeypot' categories? The idea behind this is that probably 90%-95% of users who use categories such as "sex", "nude", "porn" etc. are spammers, so what about automatically blocking user accounts which use those categories? An email could be dispatched to the webmasters list (or we could use any other form of communication) to inform people of the account being blocked, and all the webmasters would have to do is review the list periodically to undo any 'misses'.

As far as helping prevent spam users sitewide, I do think more detailed information on a few things would be useful:

1). What percentage of/how many active d.o users are using gmail accounts. (active being unblocked accounts)
2). What percentage of/how many blocked d.o users registered using gmail accounts.
3). What percentage of/how many blocked d.o users registered using gmail accounts with + addressing.

Obviously compiling this information would use the time of our already overworked infrastructure team, but I do thing it would help us make informed decisions about the best path forward.

The categories idea is not helpful. Most spam accounts don't bother with this anymore. They use a spammy name and a URL only. I suspect that these profiles might be spamvertized later.

1) 83496 unblocked users use gmail accounts.

2) 1219 blocked users use gmail.

3) There are 346 valid users using + notation with gmail and 175 spammers using +notation with gmail. The spammers are all very recent accounts.

we have a total of 344716 unblocked users and a total of 3756 blocked accounts. So, almost 1/3 of all spammers use gmail.

Has happened.

thanks, I blocked about 10.