colin mitchell @muffinista@botsin.space

mastodon 2.8.0?

hello from mastodon v2.8.0!

PSA: I will likely upgrade botsin.space to v2.8 tomorrow if I'm feeling brave.

@scots nice!

@jleedev yes exactly

@muffinista hey right back

also, new account signups are still turned off for a little while, i'll reactivate those tonight or tomorrow

i strongly suspect i'm fighting a losing battle here, the only question is who runs out of energy first, me or whoever is running this spam farm

for context, there have been around 250 accounts that signed up in the last month which i've suspended for spam. Something like 175 of those were in the last week. They've sent thousands of spam statuses out. I've slowly ramped up tools to prevent that until this point.

re: datacenters, i pulled a set of 40 unique ip address of spammers. i can identify 35 of them as being in a datacenter. blocking those is an easy choice at that point.

Hi all, I've added some code to botsin.space to help fight spam. the changes are:

1) prevent account signups from datacenters

2) prevent unsolicited statuses (in most cases) to users you don't follow

#1 is going to block many spam accounts, but is also probably going to be an issue for Tor users who want to create an account here. Sorry about that.

#2 should block a bunch of spam, and ideally you shouldn't be sending unsolicited messages anyway.

Hi folks, new account signups are off for a bit while I hammer on some spam prevention

PSA: I wrote some code last night to prevent sending DMs to someone who does not follow you, if a link is included in the status. That's running on botsin.space now. Hopefully it helps with spam issues.

This is the commit: https://github.com/muffinista/mastodon/commit/45b0720bfaf7020385e00028f0929c40a637e679

If it works out, I'll refine it and write a PR for the main repo.

@muffinista testing this https://muffinlabs.com/

just to keep things interesting, while the traffic i'm dealing with comes from OVH, it does not appear to be using Tor

@bhtooefr i've thought about that, or simply preventing you from sending a DM immediately after creating an account, but i'm not sure it would help here. it's a good idea though.

@jeffcliff i'll run my server my way and you run your server your way, and when you pass judgement on me for doing that, i will point it out. enjoy your day

@jeffcliff in this case, it was you. you were doing the value judgement. that's why i pointed it out

@sascha ugggg yeah

@sascha yeah, i agree, that was an oversight on my part. i'm sure there's a lot of legit boxes on their network

@sascha i'm going to explore something along those lines, thanks