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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?

#443

Post by krapp »

mysteria wrote: post #410
krapp wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#445

Post by anigbrowl »

fragmede wrote: post #318
maximusdrex wrote: post #6

Clearly, I'm surprised there isn't a spam filter that detects this obvious attack.

or the bot is taking advantage of holes in the existing spam filter that haven't been exploited before

Obviously you can't filter for every possibility in advance, but with a hands-on moderator and some regex it should be super-easy to throttle this. And as more than one person has pointed out, just shutting down new account creation/posting for 24 hours would be equally effective. I'm perplexed at how a mature site full owned and catering to network technologists is vulnerable to such a laughably crude attack.

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

#449

Post by tithe »

Bilal_io wrote: post #400

Are you lonely and want to do something? Flag those spam comments. Yeah, I was surprised by the amount, it feels like an attack rather than spam. I hope this didn't interrupt Dang from something more important.

I'm doing so, but sometimes I can still see/reply to the comment despite me flagging it.

Is a certain threshold of users required to flag a comment before it's removed?

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