Submitted 1 day ago by Burstar@sopuli.xyz to fediverse@lemmy.world
I’ve been noticing an influx of users with anonomized usernames (ie: fjdasklfpudiosa722104891fdaf20j.srv.us).
As a moderator this concerns me because it immediately triggers a ‘this is a bot or nefarious actor’ instinct. Is there any reason not to be wary these accounts?
I’ve been using Fedi for a long time and from the very beginning I’ve been afraid of spam and bots ruining it, at least temporarily. Spam is still a problem with e-mail, and it’s been around for 40 years and for it’s developed very sophisticated anti-spam mitigations.
The problem is that most of the ‘spam’ comes from official things like websites that you’ve signed up to and didn’t realise would also include dumb fkn emails periodically. And they don’t always do it right away either. I’ve had emails suddenly start arriving from somewhere that I signed up to like a year before.
Personally, my spam mitigation is to have one email address for signing up to shit with. Then these assholes can email me until they’re blue in the face and I don’t care because the only time I ever visit that inbox is for verification. And then I have another email address for personal use that never gets used because who uses email for personal use these days?
In conclusion. Email is for signing up to things and collecting trash that I’ll never look at.
That’s probably just mail that lands in your spam folder without being entirely blocked. According to Microsoft and Google approximately 99% of incoming spam (of the ~160 billion spam emails sent per day) never even reaches their users mailboxes. I assume that’s roughly standard across email providers. I am concerned comparably sophisticated filtering may become necessary on the Fediverse eventually.
I, for the life of me, couldn’t stop nextdoor from emailing me. I could unsubscribe myself from one category of email and they’ll start popping up again. Just had to block it on my end.
IMHO messages from things you’ve signed up to are unlikely to be “spam”. I’ve always understood that word to mainly mean completely unsolicited messages from people you have no previous relationship with at all; though if it’s clearly unwanted it might include some of the former too.
If I wanted to create bot accounts I would generate believable names
Technically it can be someone who just wants to be anonymous, but honestly they could at least use something readable
Using a barcode username is nice for being anonymous
Eg.
IlIIIllIIl
It’s a combination of lower case L and upper case I
No pipes?
Flashbacks to Rainbow Six Siege cheaters 💀
That’s incredible, I’ll use this in the future
If they want to be anonymous, sure. But they should at minimum change their display name to “Anonymous”
Totally agreed
Also, some people will intentionally add numbers at the end of the alias to make it look like all the good names were already taken. Sort of like a joke or a reference to all the bigger social media platforms.
I don’t really understand that one haha
No more wary than, say, CriticalBadger or SuccessfulCrab45. Some of the more obvious bots have very normal-looking names.
some people don’t like personalizations. this is the first account in at least 10 yrs i picked a username for. normally it’s just the string a password generator spit out. this time, i guess i figured after surving 18 months on world before deleting the account and moving. i could put 5 seconds into picking a name, since i’ll likely be on lemmy until it dies. at some point in the next year i may add the word ‘no’ to my bio but thats an excessive amount of personalization for me.
Checking the modlog i see one user - @abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
Which the reason afaik they have such a weird name is: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26773150/14235814
Are there any other users you’ve noticed with this type of username/instance name? This is the only one i saw.
Which the reason afaik they have such a weird name is:
Wierdly, when I click on the link I get a ‘server cannot handle the request error’.
Regardless, I agree that it ‘acts’ like a legit account, but still think it’s sus as hell. That entry in the modlog is from today, but I’ve definitely handled similar accounts in the past, and seen others do so elsewhere.
Sorry bout that. Instance was down for some time.
Anyways here’s a mirror just in case
That entry in the modlog is from today, but I’ve definitely handled similar accounts in the past, and seen others do so elsewhere.
I didn’t see any of that, but i’ll take your word for it. Still, this is most likely, if not definitely a real account.
You’re mostly right – those names sound like overkill. However do note I have been using Bitwarden’s Name Generator (random noun + number) and I’ve evolved the scheme a bit ( it is now always ‘user’ and I keep adding numbers until the generated username is available ).
You are THE user
john user himself
I picked an RNG name since my old common username (from reddit, etc) was not available when I started on kbin.social (RIP) and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called. I deliberately kept it short though. Not sure what to make of other RNG names – esp. long unintelligible ones – but I’ve seen at least one account that I think is legit which has a long, bizarre RNG-looking username and a non-English display name, so 🤷️
My first guess with this would be: they were read-only, then they wanted to post something or write a reply to someone and at the time considered it to be a one-time thing and created sort of “throwaway account” for that specifically, but then they kept visiting the place and it kind of just stick with them. Yet again, my guess might be completely wrong. But at least this is one of the possible motivations behind such accounts.
There are people that have a name that looks random, but has a meaning
maybe we could create a suspicious account review channel and submit them there for folks to do some digg’ing.
not sure about comms with other Admins but it would be nice to harmonize efforts amongst them a bit more/better.
mEEGal@lemmy.world 1 day ago
sounds reasonable, because this definitely looks like low-effort bots