As some of you might have noticed, we have lots (hundreds of thousands!) of random spammer accounts around. Most of them are 100% unused, and just have a short bio and URL on their profile page (which doesn’t really do much for them since the URL is nofollow, but they don’t seem to care). Some are worse, and actively edit MB to add spam artists / works / events / whatever.
I’d like to ask for two things:
If anyone has any great ideas on how to deal with spammers, please do share them. There’s a Jira ticket for this, but if anyone doesn’t have a Jira account but does have ideas, feel free to post them here!
If you see an active spammer (one that is actually creating edits), report it! For those who don’t know, the report option is on the editor’s profile. Inactive spammers are so many that it might not be worth reporting, but if you happen to see one or two and want to report them, feel free to
Some of those accounts might not be spammers, but “sleeper” accounts used for sockpuppetry. The few times I’ve seen sockpuppetry on MB, it’s been with accounts that were made and left unused for a long time so as to not be so obvious.
Browsing my local town I can see someone has registered a few accounts that have done no edits.
The user profile pages have links so perhaps they are trying to use it for SEO.
Take a look at the Users from Adelaide and you can see them.
Please report the suspicious ones as outlined by @reosarevok:
We’re also working towards enabling more editors to be able to take care of spammers, but lots of other things are more pressing, so not sure when we’ll actually get around to this, but if you want to keep an eye on it, check out the ticket:
Edit: I just removed 25 obvious spammers from Adelaide. At least one more dubious remains, but I’ve deliberately left that one until we have some more tools at our disposal (see ticket above) to triple-check that it’s really an unused account.
