Maybe spam attacks are so pervasive that what’s happening to us is just par for the course. I believe we use SSO, but it’s limited just to our site. We don’t use any external authentications. The pattern is very clear they always fill our “Gender” field with a random string of uppper and lower c…

[image] one1: The username is almost always a “real” sounding first and last name followed by a string of numbers I’ll share this from a staff member giving advice on how to detect spam accounts ‘Classic “FirstLast1234” email address format’ just typical spam account tactics [image] on…

[image] Andrew_Rowe: maybe that one confuses the AI? Maybe. In any case I’m glad it does. It’s hard to believe that an AI based bot wouldn’t know the next logical answer to a question about gender, though.

Yes, I had this too, and it stopped after I switched to manually approving posts for TL0 users. I have a custom field that lets registering users select their operating system(s) (my community is for an app), and these bot accounts had random data in that field. I used a custom Data Explorer query…

[image] fhe: and it stopped after I switched to manually approving posts for TL0 users. Did the new signups stop? Because that’s my “problem”. We actually already manually approve TL0 posts.

Yes, it stopped, but reading about your experiences now, that might have just been a coincidence. I’ve also blocked every email and IP of those accounts.

[image] fhe: I’ve also blocked every email and IP of those accounts. Yes, I’ve also been blocking the IP and email as well. Only once were two accounts using the same IP, but honestly I stopped checking. I’m slightly worried that I’m blocking so many IPs that it might start preventing real u…

Yeah a custom field on signup can often catch this sort of spam, that dataexplorer query is a good way to try and catch that now… but I think we should provide an automation of some kind that makes this easier. [image] one1: I’m slightly worried that I’m blocking so many IPs that it might start…

[image] one1: I’m slightly worried that I’m blocking so many IPs that it might start preventing real users. I also provide an email address on my website for users of my app to contact me directly, so whenever a real user cannot register, I’d probably hear about it (but haven’t yet). [ima…

[image] awesomerobot: [image] one1: I’m slightly worried that I’m blocking so many IPs that it might start preventing real users. We’ve been doing it on Meta for years… Oh no! I believe it’s a legitimate concern - many parts of the world don’t have loads of IP addresses, and it’s much…

Sure, it can be trouble for VPNs, but VPNs are also an outsized source of abuse… so there’s a burden to not taking action on them at all. I guess ideally we’d have some sort of IP reputation system so it’s not all or nothing.

Is anyone experiencing an odd spam user attack? Any way to block?

Support

Ed_S (Ed S) June 7, 2026, 4:36pm 15

Agreed!

Hmm, perhaps I should try doing that. Since a recent onslaught, I’m running in approve-new-users mode, which at my scale is quite manageable, and allows me (or other mods) to check at StopForumSpam.

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Is anyone experiencing an odd spam user attack? Any way to block?

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