Istvan & al. , there's a growing number of spammers today. Can you detect a ~ pattern & block them?
Pierre
Yes it seems to have gotten a little worse lately - but they do seem to come and go in waves, some weeks are fine then a bunch come all at once.
There are some patterns to usernames and posting spammy autobiography - we'll keep investigating.
I'll look into creating a background task that sends the first post of a user to a spam classifier and automatically bans the user based on that.
Looks like there's a programmed 10 minute interval between attacks. Maybe suspend new user creation for a while?
I will try to put in an google recaptcha authentication to login via email. This has already been added to Biostar 3.0 and we should have already switched over that version but unfortunately I have injured my hand and won't be able to start the migration to 3.0 until that heals up. But the recaptcha code should be easy to migrate over into this version.
Email based signups have been disabled. I am hoping that creating spambots via Google authentication is a bit more difficult.
Notably we had a home-grown spam detector adapted specifically for Biostar (basically asked a simple math question) so the spammer actually wrote a spambot just for Biostar. Kind of a badge of honor I guess.
I will add the re-captcha based spam protection later this week.
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