481–490 of 513 posts
Oh my god, you aren’t kidding. As of right now, there’s 350 (plus or minus a few) dead spam comments at the bottom of this page. Someone obviously misplaced a decimal somewhere - you obviously don’t want to flood a forum with THAT many bot messages.
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I clicked on the Discord link in the spam message for fun, entered a random username, and immediately got asked to verify with my phone number before I could even read the messages in the chatroom. HN doesn't need to do that and I don't want them to do that, but a simple captcha or a proof of work algo like what Cloudflare uses would at least slow down the flood of bot accounts.
That’s the Orwellian way that discord cracks down on users that it deems, for whatever reason, “suspicious”. It is tied to the IP address and anything else associated with it, but if you had an existing account before the flag then that account won't be flagged, only new accounts. There is no appeal process and they won’t even tell you what your offense was. Unfortunately I’ve had to pay for an extra cell phone line…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the Orwellian way that discord cracks down on users that it deems, for whatever reason, “suspicious”. It is tied to the IP address and anything else associated with it, but if you had an existing account before the flag then that account won't be flagged, only new accounts. There is no appeal process and they won’t even tell you what your offense was. Unfortunately I’ve had to pay for an extra cell phone line…
I don't use Discord anymore but the phone number thing seems new, in the past I was able to visit as a guest and be able to read messages but not chat. Then again Twitter and Reddit are doing the same thing now and forcing people to log in, so I'm not surprised. Considering how many community groups and open source projects now use a Discord in place of a public forum this looks like a disaster going forwards since a…
It's very frustrating as a user to be region-locked on the supposedly open internet, but the real feeling of violation happens when companies layer phone number requirements on top of the region lock, which in many countries means that your government ID is now linked to the account, because you cannot buy a SIM without linking it to your ID. Truly a cyberpunk dystopia.
Brave of this guy to link his Twitter. Quick way to get blackballed from every startup in the country.
Anyone have some insight into the motivation of spam bot behavior? It doesn't make sense to me that they'd intentionally re-post the same link on a story 100+ times. Perhaps repeating the same link is good for SEO farming? Or somehow there's a belief that 100+ identical comments is more effective than just a few? Also the comments all seem to end with a 15 character random string, which I assume is just there to add…
Just a guess: a teenager who learned to script and thought this was novel. This isn't an organized marketing campaign, it's a DoS with some links for amusement. Other than the volume, it's not even script kiddie level. Presumably they have access to proxy servers, though.
Shameful if true. But unsurprising.
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I don't know... Hacker News keeps complaining that they want the old 90's web experience back, now it feels like some shitty PHP messageboard from back in the day getting pwned by script kiddies. Enjoy the nostalgia while it lasts I guess.
I clicked on the Discord link in the spam message for fun, entered a random username, and immediately got asked to verify with my phone number before I could even read the messages in the chatroom. HN doesn't need to do that and I don't want them to do that, but a simple captcha or a proof of work algo like what Cloudflare uses would at least slow down the flood of bot accounts.
Interesting that this wasn’t baked in as a preventative method for repeat usernames. Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code… Amateur stuff. Never seen it happen before though!
And yet, he bested you, the supposedly experts at web dev and hyperscaling. You create trillions of dollars of value. And yet, your social hot spot is beyond laughably bad at handling that "incompetent" attacker.
So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots
HN doesn't have any integrity about voting in general. Look at the "about" text of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfishc for example, and then look at the username. There is a whole family of pwdisswordfish* accounts btw. The "b" account's "about" text even has a holier-than-thou attitude about it.
Also people flag strange threads, so the detection is not only automatic. If you notice something strange, you can send an email to dang: hn@ycombinator.com
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This forum is built with early 2000s technology. It doesn't even use two-factor authentication or captchas for creating accounts. This was honestly bound to happen sooner or later.
I don't want them to require a email/phone for privacy's sake, but they should definitely have a captcha of sorts to limit bot accounts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the Orwellian way that discord cracks down on users that it deems, for whatever reason, “suspicious”. It is tied to the IP address and anything else associated with it, but if you had an existing account before the flag then that account won't be flagged, only new accounts. There is no appeal process and they won’t even tell you what your offense was. Unfortunately I’ve had to pay for an extra cell phone line…
I don't use Discord anymore but the phone number thing seems new, in the past I was able to visit as a guest and be able to read messages but not chat. Then again Twitter and Reddit are doing the same thing now and forcing people to log in, so I'm not surprised. Considering how many community groups and open source projects now use a Discord in place of a public forum this looks like a disaster going forwards since a…