IMPORTANT: If you had problems with your Jam or Compo submissions over the weekend, publish it as an Extra category game and reach out to me over email and I can help out. If you were unable to create an account, do note that we had to blacklist hotmail.com and outlook.com email addresses, as well as reset passwords from these addresses. Follow this link to reset your password.
Yowza!
By now you've hopefully submitted your games and either had it or your account whitelisted. Regrettably this was something I was doing by hand. While y'all were making games, my day(s) looked like this:

When I was lucky, they looked like this.

Using that script and some hand crafted snippets of SQL, I managed to crush 6000 spammer accounts, and flag 26000 spam posts or spam games. I spent most of the weekend barely able to keep a few hours ahead, but a lucky few patterns discovered along the way were a huge help.
The first was mentioned above, the fact that a vast majority of spammers had hotmail.com and outlook.com addresses. New accounts were created every few minutes, from completely different IP addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6), and sat on for a few days not to arise suspicion before beginning their assault. Stopping signups from both domains curbed the sign-ups, but when the spam kept flowing from dormant accounts, clearing every hotmail and outlook users passwords was the best way to slow it down.
🎉
That didn't stop all the spam, but the volume now was far more manageable (only a few per hour). The problem now was the huge spam backlog accumulated over the past few weeks and months.
I got lucky a few times, that the super-spammer had some obvious patterns in their work. Many of their usernames looked like 0blahToaster, with a single number prefix and single upper case letter (or number) in the middle. That and a few thousand posts had consistent signatures in the body text, which I appreciated. :laughing:

After flagging those, it was a lot of grinding, searching for terms like livestream, john-wick, robux, and after a quick inspection flagging the whole lot of them.
By Monday nights end, I was finally through the last 4 weeks of new users, posts, and games. There are still many thousands more pieces of content left to review (roughly 60k pieces of content since I'm aware the spamming started), but the last 4 weeks covers everyone that created accounts while sign-ups were open. :sweat_smile:
Next step: Comments
Comments are a separate table in the database, so when I finish my errands today, I'll dive into those and start cleaning them up.
Switching to "Invite Only" between events
In about 2 weeks we're going to make a rather big change: between events, users will not be able to sign-up for new accounts WITHOUT an invitation.

The gist of it is that once a user passes some community "trustworthiness" criteria (TBD), they'll be able to generate invitation codes.
I want the bar for this to be low and not require my intervention, but in special circumstances I can whitelist jam site organizers and educators.
I definitely regret that it's come to this, especially given everything else that needs doing or fixing, but spammers don't play fair. 😢
Phew!
That's it from me! Again, feel free reach out if you're still having issues. I'll tackle them later today.
PS: Name and email changes will come a bit later. I want to push-out invite code support first.