Interesting Statistics for December 2022

Some of you may have seen the claims in certain journals that SoylentNews is blocking new accounts. I have been looking at the actual figures for accounts created during December 2022.

A total of 2198 accounts have been successfully created during December. Unfortunately the vast majority of these were created by a bot and they will never become active because the bot does not have access to the email addresses being quoted. The email address is required so that the initial password can be issued. The site is designed to handle a much larger number of accounts and at a far greater rate than the bot is using. This causes us no problems whatsoever. It must be keeping somebody amused though. I think it would be nice to have some form of 'captcha' (NOT Google's fire hydrant, bicycle, bus and pedestrian crossing counter!!!) to prevent bots such as these.

It is possible, indeed likely, that there will be a small number of genuine accounts buried in there somewhere but it is difficult to identify them until they become active.

In those accounts we have successfully identified 28 attempts at creating sock-puppets which have been disabled automatically. This gives 1.27% of all attempts to create an new account are blocked, which is significantly less that the the claim that 'all new accounts' are being blocked.

The latest UID to be created is 22820.

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