Note for other Instance Admins and Mods:

#MstdnGames has been flooded with bot registrations leaving what appear to be an effortful ‘reason’ for wanting to join our instance. They have all been variations of the this:

“I'm looking for a community that actively engages with leftist ideas and values solidarity, mutual aid, and anti-oppression principles. I want to participate in discussions and share perspectives in a space that is already oriented toward the values I support.”

This is just one example, I’ve seen a dozen variations of this in just the last week alone.

Just a friendly warning that bots seem to be submitting more sophisticated entries to try to get past manual screenings for new user accounts.

@britt I've see @ai6yr talking about weird admin things too over the last few days
@britt That is obnoxious. Thanks for the admin work you do!
@sundogplanets 🫶🏻 I should be thanking you, our trusty overseer of the skies. 🌌
@britt haha lok, I would never write "leftist ideas". bceause leftist is a word I don't use. That word is usually used by fascists for everyone who is not fascist.

@britt This is really alarming because it's more "effort" than I put into most forms asking me why I want to sign up for a community...

I am not sure what comes next, but much more restrictive about "reason" answers and you're going to filter out a lot of real people

@luxliquida Yeah, totally. That’s what makes this so frustrating. It also makes it more time consuming for moderation.

Using the term ‘leftist’ is a pretty big red flag for me with this particular write up though. I also note the email address and IP, and manage that accordingly, too.

@luxliquida It's happening at mastodon.nz too. Here it's not too difficult to spot because a) we practically never get this many legit sign-ups at once, lol, and b) our rule requires sign-ups to specifically state a connection to NZ which these bots aren't doing.

Normally for humans who don't state a connection to NZ I give the benefit of the doubt and double-check IP address too, but in this case the domains they're signing up from are clearly all over the map so I'm temporarily skipping that step.

@britt

@britt "Hello fellow leftists. So where are we all meeting next?"

@britt

Huh. I just told beige I wanted the 11,001 characters, and also to yell at LRRR directly. 😁

@britt Same at hcommons.social. Sometimes they pick up a word or two from our network description, making it even more challenging to spot the bot.

@Texan_Reverend ICYMI 👆🏽

@britt

@azteclady @britt Yeah, we've been seeing similar stuff. A dead giveaway on Kind.Social is when they specifically say they're looking for a "kind" space or wanting to be "kind."