Phasing out Russian Bots

[brighteyedcat]

Title
Phasing out Russian Bots

Short, concise description of the idea
Requiring codes and/or invitations to sign up for new livejournal accounts.

Full description of the ideaI've been added by 14 bots in less than 5 days and I know many other LJ are plagued by this problem as well. The current "report a bot" system is not working

Comments

[azurelunatic]

New users currently are given a CAPTCHA to solve on account signup. So. How about those invite codes?

[zarhooie]

A++

[gerg]

I'd support bringing back invite codes as long as they were easy enough to get that legitimate use of the site wasn't impacted.

They also have several useful anti-abuse features and would also let us reduce reliance on captchas, which hurts accessibility and increases frustration (we get a LOT of support requests from users who can't pass ReCAPTCHA.)

I don't quite understand the second part of your request of 'security codes' - if you mean CAPTCHAs, they don't particularly help. Implementing invite codes and letting the Abuse Prevention Team handle the existing bots would eliminate the problem.

[danceinacircle]

But that raises the question - how are the invite codes distributed? There's too many accounts created in a day for them to be manually given out, and reliance on friends with LJ accounts limits site growth too much.

If we can think of a way for a visitor who has just randomly visited LiveJournal.com to create an account without knowing anyone else on the site and without being forced to pay, while using invite codes, then I would be 100% behind the idea. Otherwise, I just don't see how it's possible.

[hammond]

OMG hivemind!

[azurelunatic]

Wrangling something like dreamwidth.org's code-sharing community takes up a reasonably significant chunk of time in even that small of a site. (For those who are not familiar with it, Dreamwidth is a "code fork" of LiveJournal with a relatively small userbase; they use invite codes and have an officially sanctioned community where anyone can leave their contact information to request an invite code, and anyone with spare invite codes can grant the request.) It would be quite a lot of human time to oversee something like that on a larger scale without a dedicated interface being built.

[worldserpent]

(My suspicion is that a lot of the bot activity is manually assisted.)

Huh, really? Are the bots on LJ so lucrative or useful that it's worth the operators' time to do that?

[februaryfour]

FYI, it's actually a way to hijack Google's "linked to a lot of people" ranking. The more pages you have on a blog, the higher your search rank. And if you're friends with a lot of people (or have a lot of people as friends), this means technically speaking a lot of people link to you (through profile pages).

Um, it's hard to explain when I'm not too clear on how to explain it, but yes, it's lucrative enough to do.

[worldserpent]

Ahhh, I see.

So the motivation of these bots is to get listed on the profile pages of other LJ users? In that case, I'm puzzled why they don't simply link to the other bot created journals, as that would have less risk of discovery and deletion by LJ staff.

Anyway, if there was a suggestion saying "option for me to vet all people listed on my profile page under the friends-of part" I would be for it, because this wouldn't impact the ability of people to friend others, only the display on someone's profile, which can already be affected by ban_set.

[charliemc]

Invite codes used to work quite well, actually. And there's always the option to buy a paid account for two months to 'try out' LiveJournal for those who don't know anyone here...

The bots situation is DISTURBING, so this might be the only way to stop it.