I've been working on identifying and removing spam from OL, and late 2013 is when the problem seemed to increase with accounts adding large numbers of auto-generated works and editions in a short space of time. Prior to that the spam was predominantly one or two entries which looked more manually crafted, so I have to agree with you there. Thanks for the article link! The motivations behind a lot of this spam behaviour isn't immediately obvious from the content of the spam, and it's interesting to note that the rise of the OL bot spam was part of a world wide trend.
Tom, I've had a look back to those specific dates and can't see anything on my spam radar. For 2014-07-22, only 18 of those 2020 new accounts added books, which was about right for a non-spam day. A few days either side though (20th and 24th) had ~50 new users adding works, and the majority of those were spammers. I recently cleared out a large number of sequentially named accounts (abam0001 to something like abam1200) that were created over a few months Sep to Nov 2014, many had added spam, but a large proportion hadn't made any edits yet. They looked like they had been abandoned, but I didn't feel comfortable leaving them active just in case someone was holding on to the passwords for later. My first thought was that these would be one of your spikes, but their creation was spread out over many days, so it wasn't them. Hopefully the increased users for those days were something more positive and legitimate than spam! Charles. On 5 January 2016 at 12:31, Eric Hellman <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'll bet the step function in late 2013 was the onset of registration > spam. > > > http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/02/crowd-frauding-why-internet-is-fake.html > > Another feature I recognize is the annual dip at Christmas. > > Eric Hellman > President, Free Ebook Foundation > Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/ > https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/ > twitter: @gluejar > > > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2016 17:28:02 -0500 > From: Tom Morris <[email protected]> > To: Open Library -- technical discussion <[email protected]> > Subject: [ol-tech] OpenLibrary new accounts > Message-ID: > <cae9vqefz_kasgb9gqpbtkstvht-oqmucgvn-cnjpd41dy1f...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Happy New Year everyone! > > I made a quick chart of the count of new accounts created by date which I > thought folks might be interested in. > > The count on 2014-3-13 is actually 6549, but I clipped it to keep from > distorting the graph too much. It corresponds to a mention on > reddit.com/r/books <https://redd.it/209un2> which generated seven times > more signups than typical for that period. > > Some other peak days, with account counts, include: > > 2011-02-24 2644 > 2012-11-26 2087 > 2014-07-22 2020 > > Anyone know what they correspond to? > > Tom > > > >
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