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Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#422

Post by nojvek »

IMO there is likely huge demand for bots that are witty and can write occasional put a useful comment with a link every now and then.

It’s going to be interesting how spam evolves. At-least spammers who aren’t lazy.

Already many of the recruiting emails I get sound a lot human. They are bots though since they send at 9am everyday

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#428

Post by anigbrowl »

Bilal_io wrote: post #414
paranoidrobot wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone like me, unable to figure out how to do that - you click Reply, and then there's a 'flag' link.

I tried at first. It's a losing game against this number of spammy comments. The temporary solution is to shadow ban the comments, the usernames seems to follow 2 naming schemas. Banning them completely will alert the attacker to change the naming schema, or to make it more random, which will make stopping them even more difficult.

For a bot-based DDOS attack it's easier to to do blanket shutdowns then it is for the attacker to whip up new randomization code. If it gets really bad just shutting down new account creation for 24 hours or making a timelag beween creation and posting is effective.
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