These bots or paid spammers have been promoting a Vietnamese holiday website and a bunch of copy-paste news articles

All have been blocked and their articles deleted.

  • Camarada ForteOPMA
    7•3 years ago

    There’s an option to block IP’s created by the username, however, it lasts for a day only. I might have to look further into this.

    • @solune
      5•3 years ago

      If the bots are using a VPN, it might be possible to block certain ranges of IP addresses based on that, as I’ve seen some websites do, but that would prevent any legitimate users who are using that VPN from making accounts. It also wouldn’t necessarily be a permanent solution if more bots arrived using a different VPN, or if the current bots switched to another VPN. You could block VPNs altogether, but that’s probably not ideal.

      How much control do you have over the wiki and its software? Are you hosting it yourself?

      • Camarada ForteOPMA
        6•3 years ago

        How much control do you have over the wiki and its software? Are you hosting it yourself?

        I have full control of the wiki and its software. I don’t have control over the machine hosting it, as I could only afford a shared plan (for now).

        The solution I’ve found for now was to restrict all editing from anonymous and new users. And to allow comrades to edit and create articles, I created a new user group allowing users to do exactly that.

        The only downside is that it’s done manually, and restricting editing will probably affect the editing frequency of ProleWiki for a while. Oh, well.

        EDIT: It’s done. A bunch of spammer accounts created, none was able to create a single article. A battle won.

      • @darkcalling
        3•3 years ago

        Bot farms commonly use rented private IP addresses. The good ones anyways avoid obvious tells like using a VPN. Basically they use methods to acquire access to IP addresses assigned to consumer facing ISPs to appear as if they’re a normal person living in some city somewhere. IP blocks are not typically the way to go to prevent spam unless you have only a few IP’s being consistently used.