Continuing dispatches on the war against spam

[denise]

A few days ago we let you know about spam prevention measures that we were taking to help stem some of the flood of garbage. One of those temporary measures included geoblocking all IPs from several of the countries that are our largest source of spam. This did (as we knew it inevitably would) have some collateral damage for real users, and we're very sorry!

We're continuing to experiment: this time we've slightly expanded the range of countries we're geoblocking to include the ones that we held off on geoblocking because it would affect too much legitimate use, but we've limited the geoblocking only to the account creation page. This should mean that if you were having trouble accessing the site because of geoblocks, you should be able to access 99% of the site without a problem, and the only page you won't be able to access is the account creation page. With luck, this should cut back heavily on our spam account creation without disrupting legitimate use of the site. The current list of countries that are geoblocked from account creation are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, and Vietnam. (If you're an existing user from one of those countries and you'd like to make an additional account, email support@dreamwidth.org with the username you'd like to register and we can register it for you. If the number of requests gets to be enough that it's taking up too much of our time, we may have to pause this until we can build automated exceptions, but we'll start there.)

We will continue to monitor the results of these experiments and adjust as necessary: when we do one of these experiments, we always make sure to define in advance what "too much interference with legitimate use" will look like, and we try very hard to stick to it. I apologize to everyone who's been collateral damage in our efforts to filter out more of the goddamn spammers.

Comments

[denise]

3) Correct, that's what it will look like.

4) Someone who doesn't read dw_maintenance doesn't read the FAQs either :)

[qitian]

4) What if an existing user were to be away from the site for some time and missed this post? Not to mention new users who don't even know this community exists. I think it's reasonably fair to expect that someone who's trying to troubleshoot the 403 block would check the FAQ, and so some of the freed-up admin time ought to be allocated towards drafting a new FAQ.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Seconding this. I spent years checking the FAQ before I started following this community.

[octahedrite]

+1, it's unreasonable to expect a new user from a blocked country to dig through dw-maintenance. In fact, the sign-up flow instructions should be on the home page for those countries.

[denise]

We'll document it once we have more than two hours of data from the test drive to see if it works, if we're keeping it, what we're changing (if any), etc: the FAQ is for permanent or very long term information, not for "we're trying this thing, it may work, it may not, we may change it back". But I will note that the reason we chose those particular countries is because the amount of legitimate usage from them is very, very low, and the vast majority of new account creation from them is overwhelmingly spam.