> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

Why do people get so unbelievably greedy when there is something for free.

Like "it's a free game server host, let's just create 100 accounts so I can have 100 empty servers"

Or "you can get a free game key if you contribute a lot, so let's just spam until I get the key"

It's so painfully to watch.

Kind of disappointing that devrant rewards and attracts bot'esque accounts for exclusively re-posting facebook memes - with stickers.

Those accounts are even as bold to constantly spam everywhere "HOW LONG DID IT TAKE FOR YOU TO GET THEM?" as if they are entitled to next day delivery, feels wasted and especially insulting to people that actually use and flourish the platform.

Not really great input nor constructive criticism, more a vent, because I know that it's the "maybe some of the shit will stick" idea - maybe some of those shit posters will turn to actual content creators on here or them being free advertisement to maybe less useless beings.

TL;DR
This works: email+rant@domain.com

Spam filtering protip:

Did you know that the email spec allows you to use youremail+something@domain.com and the emails still come to you. This is especially useful when registering to a lot of places where you are not sure whether they will spam you or not. Filtering will be easy because you have a unique email address for each service. Also you can find out which service leaked your email address to spammers.

Additionally if you want to register to a service with two accounts but still want to use the same email, you can do this easily by adding +whatever in your email address.

Is it just me, or is it the attack of the spam accounts lately?

On the bright side, with all these privacy update emails, it has given me a chance to unsubscribe from all the shitty newsletters that I subscribed loooong back and to delete unwanted spam accounts that I don't use anymore.

Thanks GDPR!

Oohhh, dropbox... You are pathetic.

I'm a long time dbx user. 10+ years ago they had a programme saying that each new dbx user created using my ref link [on different machines] grants me 500M or 1G of additional space in my acct. Around that time I used to actively fix/reinstall/setup others' computers, so I had an easy access to different machines. This way I boosted my dbx capacity to 27G. For free.

Since ~5 years ago dbx started spamming me with "you're almost out of storage" emails [I'm using ~80% of my 27G]. Annoying, but I understand - they have to keep with the sales. I can live with this occasional spam.

Now, since I got my new laptop, I'm setting up dbx on it. And dbx is SO desperate with their sales, that now they only allow sync on 3 devices max. I had to unlink other 17 devices I've ever logged in from before I could continue.

What's the next step of despair? Free accounts can only sync on weekends?

Come on. This looks ridiculous. Dropbox, get your shit together!

So, someone is trying to catfish me in some social media.
And I can make a few guesses about who it might be. Or maybe I'm being paranoid and all the accounts contacting me randomly, are just spam bots.

But this isn't the first time. From a hateful ex, to someone I turned down because I had zero feelings for, to even random stalkers who found me online and thought that I was the best choice for obsessing over, I've seen different types of online ghosts.

Like... why is it that it takes so much for some people to be decent? Why can't you just say it to my face (aka directly), get your answer, and then fuck off? And if you're actually obsessing, it is not my problem. See a fucking therapist.

Anywho, aside from the wish to be able to occasionally deliver an online slap, and occasionally wishing that everyone on the internet had an ID to be found IRL, I would like for internet to be a less hateful/harassing/terrorizing/bullying/discriminating place. I like internet. I have so many awesome friends on the internet.

I just needed to rant about it so it doesn't weigh on my mind. Now I'm gonna go back to ignoring them and living my own life peacefully. I hope y'all have a good day. 🙂

Am I the only guy using the GDPR emails as a to-do list? For each email I either delete the account with that service OR I take the opportunity to change the password. Tedious? Yeah. Satisfying? You bet!

I see all these people complaining about their inbox blowing up with "spam" but how many of those accounts or services do you still use? I bet over half of them were only signed up for to try their demo and then forgotten about.

So some asshole keeps sending phishing emails to every student and prof in our university and the IT department is too pathetic to block it. They all come from the same email and contain the same text yet they cant filter it and just send warnings not to click it.

Im getting sick of recieving 5 of these a day, i scanned and viewed the page and its just a simple form copying the outlook login page with a redirect to the actual page after submission.

Whats the easiest way to write a script that will spam them with thousands of fake accounts? How can i fuck with these guys?

I'm curious to know how lucrative it is for the people operating those 0-points accounts to post spam comments on this kind of a platform. I don't know the exact numbers of course but I have to think looking for change in your couch cushions is a better return on investment.

Dear fellow devranters

ostream has created his 3rd generation accounts, @godiebitch and @gofuckyourself

Can we please downvote him this time?
He will delete his accounts anyway in a few months but maybe we can reduce the spam that way.

And also try to convince him to get some help.

I am wondering what would it take to remove the spam / bot accounts out of devRant. Just recently seen quite a lot of them. If we collectively report their profile, would @dfox remove them ?

E.g. @chaosesqueteam

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

Petition to implement a 2FA upon registration to deter bots and spam accounts.

You know how Rule 34 of the Internet is:
"if it exists, there is porn of it"

I think another one should be:
"if it exists, there's Indian spam accounts on it"

Someone is trying to get into my shit. Mail Accounts and my phone is receiving lots of. Spam calls and phishing messages...

Fucking bastards..

We all get phishing shit but if it’s targeted it makes me feel awkward..

Little fucking bastards.. I think I even know who it is.. that useless piece of junk that got fired because of my honest feedback. Not many others know my current nr, emails etc..

Doing a physical scan of PC's in my network for anything that shouldn't be there. Find a Filezilla open for a "Roblox Generator"

Spent rest of day making a bot in Python to spam the registration with fake accounts.
Not on my network you don't!

Anybody else got stories like this?

wait,
if there are 3.4 Billions FaceBook fake users, that means than there are also at least 3.4 Billions fake email accounts around. Jeez.

And the spam traffic estimates are at 260Billions email per day or 260B/3.4B=76 emails sent by each fake email accounts per day. Much less as probably fake email accounts are more.

So, only 76 spam emails sent per account per day. I think there is still room for a big improvement

Elon permanently suspended me cos I called him out… he claims to have suspended spam accounts. But most users he’s suspending are legit OG accounts.

My current task involves processing the commoncrawl web archive, and it's like a box of junk you buy at a flea market. You find so much useless stuff, broken stuff, stuff that makes you question people...

My latest find makes me wonder what lies out there if what I found was in plain sight. I found tens of thousands of websites that look like someone used markov chains to generate pron ads. Those websites exist in 10+ languages, use the same url-scheme, read like a dyslexic camgirl reading alphabet soup and are hosted on the same three ip-adresses. There is no javascript involved and some pages link to a variety of twitter accounts.

I queried a few commoncrawl files and amassed 4GB of this spam. Every time I look at it it gets weirder. There is an italian article about malware in there too.

Here's a text sample:
"Not from her bedroom, she her stream view and meet new experience. In hd india, because swimsuit still laws exist no interaction or frigthened and."

Any disposable e-mail address service:
"FIGHT THE SPAM"
"THANK YOU FIGHTING THE SPAM"
"YOU DID GOOD BY FIGHTING SPAM"

The users of disposable e-mail address:
*creates another spam account*
*creates another multiaccount in order to exploit a system*

Companies actually fighting spam:
Now there is even more spam to fight against. (which is not good)

About 2/3 of the accounts created daily on our website are spam accounts. We have to waste our time with this shit instead of actually improving our services. Since we do not track IP-Addresses and there are countless amounts of disposable e-mail domains AND there is still the option to create countless spam e-mail addresses within legit e-mail providers, there is no easy way of stopping this madness.

"Fight the Spam", you could start by deleting your shitty service or at least give us a list of all the domains you're using, srsly.

Mesosphere sold every e-mail who registered with them to Tech Global Leads. Either that or Tech Global Leads stole a list of leaked e-mail addresses. In either case I unregistered/unsubscribed from Mesosphere and still got e-mails to those two specific accounts from Tech Global Leads with Mesosphere consulting soliciting. (So they keep e-mail information, even for accounts that unsubscribe).

TGL doesn't even have a website up. They're either amateurs or scammers. Either way, fuck you and your spam, both TGL and Mesosphere. Go die in a fire.

Hey guys, I have almost developed the backend of an app like reddit. My question is about authentication. How should I authenticate my user. Is phone number necessary to add phone otp?Because I don't want to get any legal trouble if someone posts objectionable content on the platform. Most of the apps today need phone number, I dont know why except reducing spam accounts.

Or shall I verify email by otp. But its hard to track disposable emails. I cant go for only gmail too as its banned in china. Email domains of china are weird.

Can I get into legal trouble for objectionable content posted by any evil user?

I dont want to go for auth.

I am truly baffled. How in the world am I receiving 2-10 spam wordpress account registrations EVERY DAY for a website which I've never let be crawled by search engines yet? These mail.ru accounts keep coming and seemingly for no reason. Who the fuck wants to register so many accounts, and how the fuck did they find my site to begin with? 😲
These registration emails are seriously annoying now and the site now has hundreds of fake accounts on it...