mbauman reports a surge of spam accounts that are unactivated and never seen, asking how they are created and how to purge them. Architect notes Discourse auto-deletes abandoned unactivated accounts after a configurable period. awesomerobot explains these accounts result from email verification failures, whether via API or UI, and guides admins to admin/users/list/new using the “not activated” filter for bulk deletion. The default purge_unactivated_users_grace_period_days is 14, so manual cleanup is often unnecessary unless accounts are activated to spam. Admins should use the IP lookup feature to identify patterns like shared IPs or email domains and consider additional protections.
putty and watchmanmonitor describe similar spam waves tied to single IPs with formulaic usernames. watchmanmonitor initially requests a “select all” button for mass suspension and a feature to delete all unconfirmed accounts from a specific IP watchmanmonitor. They later self-correct, noting Discourse supports selecting 100 users at once. putty confirms they and watchmanmonitor were hit by the same IP, indicating coordinated attacks.
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?
