New accounts now need to answer a short question
We decided to turn off open registrations for the site due to a massive influx of bot/spam accounts last week (about 27,000+). We originally made registrations completely open (no email verification or application) as a way to help foster new users but didn’t anticipate this!
New accounts now need to be approved by an admin after answering one “application” question (“what’s your favorite card, with a link to scryfall”). This should completely mitigate the spam account registrations going forward.
Removing the spam accounts from the database
Concurrently we’re cleaning up all these spam accounts. It’s a large number but the query we’re running looks to only hit these bots and not any real users, and I’m going through the entire list to spot check as well. If for some reason you were affected by this though, I apologize and please reach out asap and/or register again!
Hopefully the new account changes aren’t too annoying for new users and will completely stop the irritating spam.
Have a great Friday/weekend!
Quick update: spam users have just been purged and the site stats have been updated (note in the homepage sidebar that the user count is now correct).
Next up we’ll be running some queries to remove all the redundant data associated with those spam accounts but this won’t affect the site at all.