Your sign-up form is a weapon | Bytemash

How bots used our sign-up and forgot password pages to bomb real people's inboxes, and what we did to stop it. A practical guide to subscription bombing for founders and developers who think CAPTCHA is an "I'll do it later" task.

I absolutely refuse to use BigTech gatekeepers or useless CAPTCHAS (any sufficiently advanced bot can get around any CAPTCHA anyway). We solved this at our startup by running names through a simple LLM filter - if the name is gibberish like Px2846skxojw just block the signup. Worked surprisingly well. Of course this is easy to get around if the bot knows what you’re doing. But bots look for easy targets, as long as there are enough vibe coded crap targets on the internet they’re not going to bother with circumventing a carefully designed app.
Nice.