Charles,

Thank you so much for you help with this.  It greatly improves the Open Library 
service and ability to be used appropriately.

We appreciate the good work.

-jcg

John Gonzalez
Director, Engineering and Service Availability
[email protected]



> On Jan 5, 2016, at 12:00 AM, Charles Horn <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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] 
> <mailto:[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
>  
> <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 <http://unglue.it/> https://unglue.it/ <https://unglue.it/>
> https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/ <https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/>
> twitter: @gluejar
> 
>> 
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2016 17:28:02 -0500
>> From: Tom Morris <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>> To: Open Library -- technical discussion <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>>
>> Subject: [ol-tech] OpenLibrary new accounts
>> Message-ID:
>>      <cae9vqefz_kasgb9gqpbtkstvht-oqmucgvn-cnjpd41dy1f...@mail.gmail.com 
>> <mailto: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 <http://reddit.com/r/books> <https://redd.it/209un2 
>> <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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