A couple of questions, especially since I am not a programmer. Don’t these sorts of programs just randomly attack any site? Or do they have some way of collecting data and targeting specific sites? Is there anything we could learn from more popular sites (say Walmart) about how they deal with this problem? And how do I find the the IP address?
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Were all those accounts iNat accounts?
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Well, they most likely target sites that either have programable API’s or means to automate their work. I suspect most get a ‘contract’ to produce x number of instances of the advertising and just go about doing it.
Hopefully you can’t, I would hope nothing on the site exposes your IP address, but the connection records kept in the iNat central database will have it.
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@pleary this is still going on every day, any progress in determining if it is a single IP that can be blocked?
In addition to the streaming tv projects, there appear to be good numbers of apparently Chinese language projects getting created.
None have url’s in the text, but they all are collecting all 28 million records and have sketchy looking user names behind them. Unfortunately I can’t read Chinese to determine if they are spam or errors on attempts to create legitimate projects
Yikes! I tried translating some, but the project titles do not translate using Google translate, and the descriptions are repetitive nonsense words. Link I used: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/browse?utf8=✓&order=created
I opened one project and indeed the project is collecting all observations worldwide. The creator is almost certainly fictitious: qw3r5nljj5nv3z. That is the user name. They have no observations and no identifications. How they are creating projects escapes me, but the number suggests the generation process is automated. I would have thought the 50 verifiable observations requirement would have shut this down, but I do not work with projects and perhaps whatever type this is does not need to meet that requirement?
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Yeah, those limits unfortunately only apply to traditional projects (and places), not collection or umbrella projects.
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Perhaps those limits should be applied to all projects (and places)… I also do not remember how to flag a user as a spam generator, perhaps as a non-curator I cannot do that? https://www.inaturalist.org/people/shoahopuk has five observations, all spam for streaming sports feeds as far as I could determine. I can flag the observations, but the username appears to be the problem. If I could flag the user for curation… 
If enough individual observations are flagged as spam, the user account is automatically flagged as well. So go ahead and flag the observations when you see them.
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Yeah I saw a bunch of these a few days ago from similarly suspicious accounts, and both title and description translated to meaningless repetitive word sequences. Seems like purposeless spam, but I’m calling it spam nonetheless, since it seems to be machine generated.
OK, just looked, and this is beginning to look like an all-out attack, pages and pages of them.
@pleary @tiwane @kueda we need some help here!
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/browse?order=created&page=1&utf8=✓
74 pages of them!
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Yeah, and counting. They’re coming way faster than I can suspend accounts.
I can help
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Some of them now aren’t just meaningless text anymore. One recent one’s title is "
Where to buy the new wireless bank card collector"
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And bizarrely enough the project description is “Chinanews network June 20th according to foreign media reports, local time on the 19th, the United States announced the withdrawal of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), accused The Human Rights Council “has long been biased against Israel.” The United Nations expressed disappointment with the United States in making this decision. According to reports, when US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced that the United States had withdrawn from the Human Rights Council, US Secretary of State Pompeo stood next to her. Regarding the withdrawal of the United States from the UN Human Rights Council, Heli slammed that the United States called for reform of the institution, but the voice has not received attention. The Trump administration has long threatened that the United States will withdraw if the Human Rights Council is not thoroughly reformed. During George W. Bush’s administration, the United States resisted it for three years on the grounds that the Human Rights Council was full of Israeli enemies. It was not until 2009 that Obama returned to the organization. The United Nations expressed disappointment with the withdrawal of the United States. A spokesman for UN Secretary-General Guterres said that “the UN Secretary-General hopes that the United States will continue to stay in the UN Human Rights Council”, “the agency plays a very important role in promoting and protecting human rights throughout the world.” In addition, the report said that the move was immediately met.”
Yeah, its all spam. I’ve been monitoring the New Users page and suspending the suspicious “qw3r5nljj5nv3z” - like accounts as fast as they pop up, which is fast at the moment.
Unfortunately I may get thrown off-line here in another 15 minutes or so. My lovely ISP has been faithfully dropping internet connection at midnight for the past few days, lasting 1-3 hours.
If I suspend a user of their project, is the project automatically masked too? Or do I have to flag each project as spam as well?
No, unfortunately the projects stay visible. Just trying to nip new accounts in the bud for now, until staff can deal with the projects, that’s way beyond my pay grade at this point ;-)
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