How to protect spam bot attacks in Discussion?

[serge-rider]

Select Topic Area

Question

Body

Last week we experience a massive spam attack in our discussion: https://github.com/orgs/dbeaver/discussions
Several thousands of new discussions and comments are created every day. Eventually Discussions become useless.

We cannot block spam bots by reporting every single one to GitHub (new ones created faster than we block them).
We cannot block them by ourselves because moving a user to a block list doesn't prevent it to create new discussions (it works only for issues/PRs).

DBeaver is a popular community with thousands of users. But we will have to close discussions completely next week.

Is there any other possibility?

[Xelliese]

One thing you could try is tightening up your account creation process, like adding email verification or CAPTCHAs. Another option might be using automated spam detection tools, although they might not catch everything.

[LiteBrite82]

@serge-rider,
We feel your pain! We have a small team (myself included) that takes care of the spam that makes it past our AI filters in this discussion board; not to mention GitHub as a whole. You can mitigate by Limiting interactions in your repository.

Admins can also block/ban individual users in the "comment options" dropdown; it also has an option to delete or hide all of that users posts (batch) to save time.

[nicholaszein]

Unfortunately, these options are only available to comments. The initial post doesn't have this option. You have to block each one manually in the Moderation settings and delete the discussion, also manually (unless to spend time creating an automation, which is a huge waste of time).

It would help if we had the option to select multiple discussions in the discussions list (just like with Issues) and perform actions like delete and block authors.

[nicholaszein]

We are also suffering from this problem in our organization's discussions.

I had to change all categories to the "Announcement" type to prevent users from posting. I am now painstakingly deleting thousands of posts one by one.

[jricciardi]

FYI folks, we have escalated this internally. I can't share timeline or make promises on their behalf, but the team responsible for mitigating GitHub-wide spam is aware of this new abuse vector and is prioritizing it alongside other GitHub-wide abuse vectors.