I’d ask for their cell number and send a verification code. That’ll stop 95% of all duplicate accounts. Keep the hash of their phone number in a hash list, rather than the number itself. Don’t allow signups from outside whatever region you can SMS for free.
I realize this would mean relying on an external protocol (SMS), but it might just keep the crap out. Would help for ban evasion too, at least within an instance.
Until someone uses a bunch of Google Voice numbers and gets each of them banned before someone a few months later happens to get one of the banned numbers and tries to sign up.
Only bringing it up because a similar thing happened to me; I got a Google Voice number and found out it was already related to a spam account on a site I wanted to use. Their support team understood and it had been like 6 months so they undid it but still. Bit of a pain.
Which is why (much to my chagrin as someone who has only given out their GV number for 10+ years) many companies are blocking numbers identified as VOIP even if they are capable of doing SMS/MMS, and some even go so far as to block prepaid phones. This was a component of that whole Overwatch 2 phone number controversy: not only were they requiring a phone number to play despite people’s battle.net accounts being years old, but they were also preventing some people from using their completely legitimate phone numbers.
Or if you just don’t want to give your “proper” phone number out to every single company out there to add to their spam list, sell on to anyone else, and give away for free every time they have a data breach. I use GV out of necessity for blocking spam calls.
It would set a higher bar for a bot, but SMS wouldn’t stop them.
There are SMS providers that will happily spin you up a number with one API call, then return any messages sent to them.
The spam account could have a number, confirm the message, then delete the account faster than a human could solve a captcha.
I’d ask for their cell number and send a verification code. That’ll stop 95% of all duplicate accounts. Keep the hash of their phone number in a hash list, rather than the number itself. Don’t allow signups from outside whatever region you can SMS for free.
I realize this would mean relying on an external protocol (SMS), but it might just keep the crap out. Would help for ban evasion too, at least within an instance.
I would not give my cellphone number to a random Lemmy instance.
Until someone uses a bunch of Google Voice numbers and gets each of them banned before someone a few months later happens to get one of the banned numbers and tries to sign up.
Only bringing it up because a similar thing happened to me; I got a Google Voice number and found out it was already related to a spam account on a site I wanted to use. Their support team understood and it had been like 6 months so they undid it but still. Bit of a pain.
Which is why (much to my chagrin as someone who has only given out their GV number for 10+ years) many companies are blocking numbers identified as VOIP even if they are capable of doing SMS/MMS, and some even go so far as to block prepaid phones. This was a component of that whole Overwatch 2 phone number controversy: not only were they requiring a phone number to play despite people’s battle.net accounts being years old, but they were also preventing some people from using their completely legitimate phone numbers.
Yeah its a whole mess out there if you don’t have a proper phone number
Or if you just don’t want to give your “proper” phone number out to every single company out there to add to their spam list, sell on to anyone else, and give away for free every time they have a data breach. I use GV out of necessity for blocking spam calls.
Indeed.
It would set a higher bar for a bot, but SMS wouldn’t stop them.
There are SMS providers that will happily spin you up a number with one API call, then return any messages sent to them. The spam account could have a number, confirm the message, then delete the account faster than a human could solve a captcha.
Is this really true?
Twilio is the biggest sms back end and it’s like $10 per number month or something.
$1.15/number/month, though that is still some cost.
You’re right, the cost would make it a huge filter for spam. But you could conceivably have 1000 accounts on a verified server for just over a grand.
No need to store the phone number hash at all. Discard it after the code is sent. What is the purpose of keeping the phone number hash?