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Handling spam accounts - best practices?

Hello NodeBB Community wave

I started a purge for our forum with the goal of deleting spam accounts.
Started with ~40000 user accounts and realized very fast that deleting them manually will be a Sisyphus task.
Vibe coded a usercleaner plugin with filters and stuff like that.

image.jpeg

So with that filter, 70.20% of all accounts are spam.
After that was cleaned out I looked deeper into more recent accounts and was a little shocked.

I identified a set of mail hosts used for verification over and over again.
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BrutalBirdie

Hello NodeBB Community wave

I started a purge for our forum with the goal of deleting spam accounts.
Started with ~40000 user accounts and realized very fast that deleting them manually will be a Sisyphus task.
Vibe coded a usercleaner plugin with filters and stuff like that.

image.jpeg

So with that filter, 70.20% of all accounts are spam.
After that was cleaned out I looked deeper into more recent accounts and was a little shocked.

I identified a set of mail hosts used for verification over and over again.
From the manage user view with 500 accounts did a little RegEx search with a browser plugin and got 381 of 500 users are from these mail hosts.
So 76.2%.

After I complete my purge, from 39133 accounts 2754 are left.
93% of accounts where spam or the other way around only 7% "good" accounts.

note: will create some feature requests since I noticed some stuff in the manage user view


I found this plugin https://github.com/NodeBB-Community/nodebb-plugin-email-blacklist but also thought, that can't be it.
These bots will just use other mail addresses.
So, how do you guys handle this? Just ignore it?

Looking forward for some input from the community.

Thanks for reading and thinking about a clean forum with me smile

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