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Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
501–510 of 513 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A teenager who just learned to script bested a forum for (and by!) the Silicon Valley elite? Shameful if true. But unsurprising.
Isn’t that every hacker lore story ever? It’s always David and Goliath. Script kid vs fbi vs nsa vs Microsoft/xbox vs etc.
It’s an elegant story arc.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Worth noting that in GP's case it may "only" be that the people running that specific server turned on the phone number requirement to view messages.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#504Would love to see a postmortem once it's dealt with.
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 created a new account recently and I had to complete a captcha. It was the Google kind that is easily defeated by either bots or mechanical turk, though.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#505Earlier 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…
As a non-Discord user, I'm glad I'm a non-Discord user. That sounds hellish. Is whatever's being gate-kept worth it?
Usually it’s the only option for something. But if you don’t care about any of the something’s, then you don’t really need to be a user.
For me it’s worth it, but there’s no option either.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#506Earlier 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…
Worth noting that in GP's case it may "only" be that the people running that specific server turned on the phone number requirement to view messages.
I thought that the server setting covered sending messages only, not reading them
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/216679607--Ver...
> Verification Levels refer to the levels of security a user must meet before they're allowed to send text messages in a channel.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#507To be or not to be...
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#508What a mess, this is literally the first time I saw something like this on HN. They've even started posting on this thread! HN has been running slow since the flood started and I wonder if it's causing a mini-DDoS effect. The usernames of the spammers are "2genders ", "SEXMCNIGGA ", and "indianmilf "; for some strange reason they keep the same prefix and just alter the number so it should be easy for admins to block…
Agreed, they should ban Twitter links.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#509Earlier 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.
> but they should definitely have a captcha of sorts to limit bot accounts
Captchas don't do much, they're super cheap to solve with services like 2captcha, capmonster, etc.
You can get recaptcha solved for $0.6/1k, hcaptcha for $0.8/1k or cheaper. (email is pretty cheap too, but still more expensive than captcha solving)
Requiring phone verification would be the most effective out of those because it's pretty expensive for the attacker, something like $0.02-$0.11 per verification is usually what I see
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#510Why SEXMCNIGGA though? Shouldn't a bot try to pass as a user?