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Handful Spam Accounts created during Easter break - anyone else?

  • 11 April 2023
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Daniele Cmty
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Userlevel 2
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Hello there inSpirers and inSpirees,

Our Communities saw an increase of spam accounts being created during Good Friday and Easter Monday. They even posted a few spammy posts (but nothing inappropriate, just some “tests” and gibberish texts).

Usually it happens only once every other month, but this time we had a handful occasions on the same day (Easter Monday).

I am assuming that the Holidays  are a primetime for Bots and Spammers because Moderators are notoriously Out of Office - but I wonder if anybody else has had some similar experiences?

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Best answer by olimarrio 18 April 2023, 13:31

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KrisGoose
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Nothing on our end but I did see a ton of spam posts come in from the Miro community which I’m a member of (also built on insided). They were posting the same message in almost every possible thread

— Kris
Alistair FIeld
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Userlevel 3
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We had a couple of spam posts over the weekend for sure.

But not new user registrations.

The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few. 🖖
olimarrio
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Userlevel 4
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Hey @Daniele Cmty 👋,

We did see a small spike across communities over the long Easter weekend. The best practice is to always ensure these posts are marked as spam, so that this feeds into our third party spam checker Akismet’s algorithm (and similarly to mark any false positives as ‘not spam’). 

If you’ve had a big influx of spam during a particular time period, it’s also good to let our support team know (with examples) so that they can get in touch with Akismet directly and that they can look into this more closely. They often investigate these attacks quickly and make the necessary updates in order to catch this type of spam in the future, although it’s of course a constant game of cat and mouse.

Chris Hackett
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Hi @olimarrio as you said to let you know, we had a large (for us) attack for an hour this morning between 6-7am PT. Had about 70 posts (all but a few caught by spam engine) and 24 users created that were banned.

Chris
olimarrio
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Userlevel 4
Badge +4

Hi @Chris Hackett 👋,

Sorry to hear this and thanks for letting us know. Can you please raise a support ticket with some example links to the spam topics. They will forward these to Akismet so that they can update their algorithm. Thanks 🙏

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