Battling Signup Spam on the Bill Tracker (Shallow Thoughts)

Battling Signup Spam on the Bill Tracker

I've spent a lot of the past week battling Russian spammers on the New Mexico Bill Tracker.

The New Mexico legislature just began a special session to define the new voting districts, which happens every 10 years after the census. When new legislative sessions start, the BillTracker usually needs some hand-holding to make sure it's tracking the new session. (I've been working on code to make it notice new sessions automatically, but it's not fully working yet). So when the session started, I checked the log files...

and found them full of Russian spam.

Specifically, what was happening was that a bot was going to my new user registration page and creating new accounts where the username was a paragraph of Cyrillic spam.

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