mbauman reported a surge of spam accounts on Discourse that had never been “Seen” or “Activated,” asking for methods to identify and purge them. awesomerobot explained that these accounts remain inactive because email verification was never completed, which also prevents them from being marked as “seen.” He provided steps to use the admin/users/list/new interface with the “not activated” filter and bulk selection tools. Additionally, he noted that Discourse automatically purges unactivated users after 14 days by default, controlled by the purge_unactivated_users_grace_period_days setting. He advised checking for patterns such as shared IPs or email domains to identify bot activity.
Other users confirmed similar issues. putty and watchmanmonitor reported hundreds of accounts created from the specific IP address 89.124.71.104 with usernames following the pattern b followed by random numbers. While watchmanmonitor initially struggled with suspending users in batches, they discovered a “select all” option for bulk deletion see update. mbauman confirmed facing the same IP-based swarm, noting at least 193 affected accounts, and described a separate group of bots that reached Trust Level 1 to send spam private messages.
The community discussed the potential source of the attack. Jagster wondered if the OAuth-related issues seen on Mastodon were responsible. putty linked to a related meta discussion and asked if the offending IP should be preemptively blocked for all customers. Overall, the thread served as a collaborative troubleshooting session for handling mass account creation spam, highlighting built-in admin tools for filtering, bulk deletion, and IP-based investigation.
I’m tracking down a huge influx of spam accounts on our discourse. There are a large number (hundreds!) of recently-created accounts that have never been “Seen” and are not yet “Activated” — how does this happen? Are they using some API to create the account? Or creating the account and then never logging in? This seems to be a very strong signal that these accounts are spam, but I don’t know what it actually means or if I can filter on it to mass-delete them.
Is there a UI to find and purge these un-seen and/or un-activated accounts? Perhaps it’s something that could/should happen automatically after some lengthy delay?
Looks like there is a way, believe that is automatically done after a certain number of days for un-activated accounts which you can adjust to less or more days:
If it’s a recent big wave, then I’d guess a bot of some kind… much of the internet is now under regular bot hammering… these accounts will remain useless until activated, so I’m not sure why someone would create and then abandon them though.
Someone created an account, never verified the email, and therefore can’t log in. Without activating an account, it will never have a seen record.
Discourse is one big API, so someone can directly access the same endpoints the interface does to create an account. It’s certainly possible to automate, though someone doing so would have to work around rate limits to create many accounts quickly.
From admin/users/list/new there’s a “not activated” filter
From here you can click the icon over the avatar in the table header to enter bulk select mode. You can delete accounts this way if needed.
Discourse will automatically delete these after 14 days by default as long as they have no posts, the relevant site setting is purge_unactivated_users_grace_period_days.
If you select one of the users and go to their admin page, you can also use the “IP lookup” button to see accounts associated with the same IP. If multiple accounts are associated, you’ll get the option to delete them:
You shouldn’t need to do anything manually and can rely on the auto-purge… but maybe worth keeping an eye on if there are many accounts or if some are being activated to create spam.
Are there any patterns? same location? same IP? same email domain? You can consider adding more protections if there’s a tell of some kind.
Thanks Kris! This was unfortunately very helpful for me, too. We also just had a surge of new users that were clearly spam. Since 10/16, we have had 268 users all sign up from the same IP with usernames that were b & a bunch of random numbers (b123456789).
We had the same experience.. 266 accounts recently from 89.124.71.104
When I went to block one, the gui allowed me to manually select 10 more users to suspend, but not all. It’d be nice to allow an “all” button, vs having to select 10, and repeat 25 more times.
Unless there’s already a better way to mass suspend?
Precisely what prompted this question, yes! At least 193 here. We also had another swarm of a few dozen other bot accounts that gained TL1 and then spammed 20 private messages each — it was in searching for more of those that I noticed the b123456789 accounts.
