The Russians are coming
This updates my last blog post where I said that we’re getting a flood of spambots. Summary: if you’re an admin affected by this, you must act now.
I’ll cut to the chase. It seems that this week’s collection of spammer registrations come from Russia. I think that the spam they’re sending today is a probe to see who will respond to it. My prediction is that instances who don’t act quickly will see those accounts stop posting and drawing attention to themselves. In a few months, say nearing the American mid-term elections, they’ll wake up and start steering the inevitable political conversations in directions that we, the instance admins, had not intended. By that time it will be too late to easily root them out because their numbers will have exploded during the time we were looking the other way and hoping the problem will go away.