New Applicants, "Why was I denied?"

[Ramsis]

Good morning everyone! Your favorite admin/moderator/community thing guy muffalo here to give a quick heads up:

WE'RE BEING TARGETED BY SPAMBOTS >:V

Yes, I know that is nothing new for a lot of you but it has meant that to save the forums from 500000 sleeper accounts and 20-30 spambombs a day I've taken down the application process from open door to needing my/any admin's personal approval. I woke up this morning to 70 pending applications, I wittled those down to what I assume are 4 actual users and 66 spambots who got denied. It took me about 30 minutes to validate as best as I could but I got the accounts settled.

Please keep in mind that I am still human and may screw up from time to time. If you were denied please reapply and message me on Discord so I can accept you. I am Ramsis#6666 on Discord!

"But Ramsi, what sort of things make you deny a person?"
Well Billy I'm glad you asked! There is a rough pattern that I use, and its going to sound terrible but I swear I'm not out for direct blood on this. Accounts being denied have one or more of these things:

Come from a Russian email host (Sorry Russian users but a lot of the botspam over the years has been coming from .ru email hosts so I shoot to kill for safety. Nothing against our wonderful Russian userbase, you just kinda got shotgunned and I apologize for that.

Have a username that is a two-capped name such as "JohnSmith," "ValerieBlack," "JohnCena," etc. We don't get a lot of users like this and I personally check each name coming in like this by validating if their email address registered sounds reasonable.

If your email is any one of these: "[email protected]," "[email protected]," "[email protected]." These fall under the same shotgunning problem as the .ru crowd but again its me trying my best in an ocean of trouble so please understand I apologize profusely!


I hope I haven't accidentally denied too many people but if I have please know its not because I, the community, or Ludeon don't want you to join this wonderful forum it is just me trying to wade through an ocean of spambots and you accidentally got cut. As before please accept my apology and know that I can be personally reached on Discord either at my direct account of Ramsis#6666 or our Discord at www.discord.gg/rimworld!

[Bozobub]

I'm already a member, so I'm not impacted, but for what it's worth, this sounds a) quite reasonable, b) the only possible way to minimize the infestation with any real effectiveness, and c) pretty obnoxious for you to have to deal with.  Thanks for taking the bullet(s) for the team !

[Shurp]

Is CAPTCHA a possibility? I have no idea how much one of those systems costs to implement.

[Canute]

Captcha (or something similar) is allready for new user below x postings.
But it isn't perfect and the scripter allways find a way to succesful submit it.

[Shurp]

Wow, those are pretty determined spammers!

[vzoxz0]

Maybe sticky this?

And clearly these aren't spambots, they are Mechanoids looking for weaknesses in humans.

[Ramsis]

This is how many new accounts have applied since I made this thread a few hours ago.



This was also my 1000th post so that's kewl.

[Pangaea]

Tell them to complain in the forum if they got denied.

[Kirby23590]

I can't believe that many Mechanoids were raiding us and that they mostly came from the east! That's where the mechanoid hive was!

Silliness aside...

I mean, what were the spammers accomplishing for? I don't really understand why they were doing it, unless they really wanted some poor guy to go to their website, desperately for something fishy... :/

[Ramsis]

After a few hours of sleeping.. ;~;

[Canute]

Hehe, that remind me at the movie Bruce Almighty.
After he finished to answer the prayers, he got more then he started ! :-)

[Pangaea]

After a few hours of sleeping.. ;~;

Sounds like a bad case of bug infestation. Except in this case you won't be rid of the buggers when you get the counter down to 0 

[Pangaea]

Probably very difficult to tell from registrations, but loads of bots have been getting through lately, and are now spamming links to various websites using their signatures. I've reported heaps, and I think a few others have too. Please take action

[Kirby23590]

Same too. Seeing lost of bots infiltrating by imitating human writing by copying reddit posts or from ludeon and other forums.

These new type of mechanoid species should not be ignored. And i blame the institute by making these synths try to replace us all.
For those who know or played Fallout 4...

I looked and ran around the forums here in general and other parts of the such as mod forums and rounded these bots up. If those links don't work or give an error, it means they were deleted.
EDIT: All links give an error. *In Wayne's voice* Eradicated...

We kinda turned blind eye on them, but they kinda follow them same tactics we just encountered.

• First time post.
• Borrowed the entire subject from Reddit or elsewhere.
• Has strange signature links leading to some apps or websites.

That's all i see from them, wasting some advice from us. We need a new weapon against these new types of bots. I'll report them if i find em' suspicious and a synth in disguise.

[Ramsis]

Keep on reporting and I'll keep on killin'!