Feedback and suggestions

A few people have already commented on the fact there are a lot of bot and scam accounts popping up. Adding Capcha even just when creating an account would probably significantly reduce the number of them joining. Adding it to the login would likely help stop existing bot accounts from logging in.

Hi doublefrosted,

Thanks for your suggestion. We actually used to have the Google Captcha but the spammers quickly found a way around it. The hacks are probably out there on the Internet and easy to look up.

We're trying to avoid going down the route of having to enter your mobile number in order to sign up, since many people may not like this for privacy reasons. The difficulty with keeping the site open is that we have to distinguish between real users and scammers which is not always easy to do. However, I'm currently working on a number different techniques which I hoping will reduce their numbers. It's a constant tech battle between us and them.

Hi Hiccupx,

Thanks for getting back to me, and glad to hear this is something you and the team are looking into.

Another option might be 2FA, either via emailed code or a third party authenticator.

Thank you for the work you and the FF team are doing to provide a safer online space for us all.

I’m currently doing a build of a social project and have faced similar issues. 2FA can be scripted as the spammer simply scripts the response required to whatever email they create.

Re captcha, there are bots that already defeat a great proportion of google and hcaptcha.

I must admit it is annoying when you get marketing bots pushing yachts etc on the forums or the occasional stray message but it’s not that frequent and the paywall seems to stop mass dming fairly well.

Might be worth having a flag count to create a posting/messaging hold until review of flag, but that could quickly spiral in to a time consuming task.

Marketeers are a vile breed!