this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025

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Will LW PLEASE do something (ANYTHING!) about that obnoxious hit-and-run account? (startrek.website)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by IcedRaktajino@startrek.website to c/support@lemmy.world

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

See title.

The same person creates a new account every few hours, posts a bunch of stuff, and self deletes. They've been doing it for months or more.

I get you can't just patch the software to limit deleting, but maybe run a script to detect deleted accounts. If they're less than 6 hours old, ban with content removal?

Edit: Apparently, shortly after posting this, federation from Lemmy.World stopped to my home instance and it's now well over 100,000 activities behind. I guess that's something 😆

Here's a very non-comprehensive list of the ones I've seen:

all 19 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

One option is to switch to a PieFed instance running V 1.3.6. The devs did something about this for PieFed users that should help.

v1.3.6
Stop floods of spammy posts from very new accounts on lemmy.world.
New accounts (< 24h old) from lemmy.world are now limited to 3 posts in their first day.

V1.3.3
Automatically delete posts by very young accounts that self-delete.

piefed.social and feddit.online are two that are running the latest code. I'm sure there are others.

Yeah, that person is quite annoying.

[–] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (4 children)

This doesn't really solve the problem. This person used to scramble/delete their own content in the past before they went to delete the entire accounts.

They're a rather persistent ban evader who can't accept not being welcome in some spaces on the internet. Even before they started deleting accounts they already used multiple accounts to evade bans.

I'd be happy to hear suggestions for addressing this without essentially banning all new accounts. Preventing new accounts from participating will only result in them aging accounts for a bit before usage and discouraging legitimate new users from participating.

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Seems like they're creating a new account per post now.

Suggestions (keep in mind I don't know the technical viability of these):

Rate limit signups in Lemmy to one per 24 hours per IP (if I understand the rate limits correctly). Anyone requesting multiple accounts per day is immediately sus anyway.
Block their IP address
Use registrations the way they're meant to be used instead of rubber-stamping them with a bot
In addition to the above, check against a list of their known accounts. There's not an easy regex way I can see, but the account names all have a similar "feel" to them.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

When I modded reddit subs I always had a karma minimum to post, it seemed to drastically reduce bullshit posts. It wasn’t even very high, like 100.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Preventing new accounts from participating will only result in them aging accounts for a bit before usage and discouraging legitimate new users from participating.

Exactly.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 9 points 2 months ago

The admins are aware of it, judging by this github issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6013

There is already a PR to make it easier to deal with their leftovers.

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

So I’ve noticed this too a lot lately.

There’s still a lot of hit and run accounts and it’s wild that an account can be created, dump articles, delete itself, and the posts remain up.

Examples:

u/Valorian

u/Vadian

Then there’s accounts that are still up, but are posting at an insane rate

u/Krewl 21 posts on a 3 hour old account

u/nuemenon with 831 posts in 11 days, that’s 20 posts per minute!

Why are accounts like these that are clearly bot accounts, with some bit of human interaction possibly, allowed to remain up? Just for the sake of content and interaction? Seems like a good way to allow propaganda bots to run free.

Most of these accounts seem to be targeted at !worldnews@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world and primarily on the lemmyworld instance, at least in the very little time I’ve looked at this. Might just be that lemmyworld is one of the largest instances, but still.

I know it’s probably hard to tackle on the mod side, but it does feel like there should be limits on how much an account can flood an instance with content or if an account is deleted, or banned, shortly after posting their content should come down as well. I thought bot tags were a thing, and maybe they are, which might help some, but doesn’t stop the issue.

Edit:

Just after posting this and here’s a 1 hour account with 11 posts already.

u/Vany

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Most fixes I can think of would effectively be a one move blunder, where the opponent's move is extremely obvious and only leaves us in a worse position.

The only real fix I can think of is to require everyone to sign in with a Steam account that has spent > $200 or similar.

[–] Emopunker@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Since the problem is ongoing, why not do some temporary manual vetting of accounts? Or is there a function to just prevent account from posting for a few days and they can only comment?

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world -3 points 1 week ago

Absolute genius! Finally all those summer/winter sales are paying off

[–] SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

What even would be the point of someone doing that?

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Astroturfing, propaganda

[–] SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But if they then delete, what's that accomplish?

[–] 6nk06@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Making people angry for the short time the post is up. Aka propaganda.

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The post remains up even if they delete the account tho I believe

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago

It does but apparently this user is going back (likely with a script) and scrambling all their activity.

[–] Emopunker@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Issue is still ongoing. I have banned a few accounts that would spam 20 to 30 posts a day to abandon the account after one to three days, just to make another. Got really bad since Valeshio.