Brace yourselves,massive number of brand new & newbie accounts waking up lately.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Is it just me or the number of accounts waking up has been abnormal?
It seems to have been so rampant especially lately.

And If you look at Seclog, 99% of the accounts waking up and Brand New and Newbie.
A massive 12,369 accounts have woken up in the last 30 days at the time of this post(is that figure really normal?)



Could it be some account farmers preparing for a spamfest now that Bitcoin Price looks a little good?

[TheNewAnon135246]

They would need to rank up those accounts first. In that case we will see some unusual meriting soon.

[Sharon121212]

Yes you may be right bitcoin prices are looking good and also altcoin are not doing poorly themselves and this would lead to the influx of ico right now majority of which are fake so bounty or ico farmers are gearing themselves up In the wake of a bull run.

[The Cryptovator]

Most likely hunters are waking up since bitcoin price is going up. Or, may be some banned user using their alts and they would like to build their account again. Yes, as TheNewAnon135246 already said, we might experience merit abuse lately with newbie account.

However, I had noticed it but we can't do anything with it.

[LogitechMouse]

The continuous rise of the price of Bitcoin drove those dead accounts to wake up again. They will join in different bounty campaigns but they can't join if they can't get any merit so merit sending to different alts will happen too. New accounts = more bounty participants =  more spam shit

[Jating]

Right, so everyone should be ready to report any suspicious account waking up and then shit posting the hell out of this community again. Obviously there could be merit abuse as well, because they need to rank up one way or another. If we can connect those cheaters, the better.

[tranthidung]

It is normal based on my past time series plot:

ABSTRACT
(1) 50% of observed months have intra-month registered account range from 2311 to 27790 (the interquartile range);
(2) 50% of observed months have intra-month registered account above or below 10432 (the median);
(3) The intra-month registered account fell 91.6% from its all time high in 2017 at 238400 to 20046; whilst the bitcoin decreased nearly 83.9%.
(4) The demotion on Junior Members in September 2018 probably caused intra-month registered accounts fell considerbaly later months.
(5) The difference in means of before and after periods (cut-off timepoint is Sept. 2018) is -63.6%.

Time-series plot

< ... >
Statistics over years
In both medians and means, the year of 2018 has been the highest year with its median and mean of monthly registered accounts are 66895 and 64782, respectively.

- The median means that 50% of months in 2018 have total registered accounts above 66895 or below 66895.
- The interquartile range for 2018 is 38393 to 88373. It means 50% of months in 2018 have figures in range from 38393 to 88373.
I always use median and interquartile range for descriptive statistics because they automatically exclude effects of outliers data points.

Code:

. tabstat regacc year10 year11 year12 year13 year14 year15 year16 year17 year18, ///
>         s(n mean sd p50 p25 p75 min max) c(s)

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      regacc |       112  22199.58  34773.29     10432    2310.5     27790         3    238433
      year10 |        13       146  144.3185       148        22       204         5       384
      year11 |        12  3795.583  3560.192    2469.5      1900    4419.5       938     14048
      year12 |        12  2313.667    353.35    2151.5    2048.5      2636      1901      2958
      year13 |        12  11433.42   8798.91      7399      5219     15989      3320     28776
      year14 |        12  15041.42  8092.689   11552.5      8818   20299.5      7974     29839
      year15 |        12  24992.25  19299.52   17514.5      9151   37009.5      7644     68601
      year16 |        12  16553.67  9350.784   12505.5   10668.5   19635.5      9844     42233
      year17 |        12  63804.75  67452.29     38296   17930.5   83022.5     13664    238433
      year18 |        12  67431.75  34995.66     66895     38393     88373     20733    136872
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Or in my another topic: Time Series on monthly statistics of forum (new users, new topics, new posts)

1) New members and new topics

A quick overview. It seems that monthly statistics on new members and new topics tend to hit peaks each two-year period.
2) New posts

[erikalui]

Result of the perm-ban spree taking place this week. Most must be alt-accounts of those users.

[tranthidung]

Result of the perm-ban spree taking place this week. Most must be alt-accounts of those users.

It is one of reasons. Permanent bans and rises of bitcoin, together result in massive number of total woke-up accounts recent days. Permanent bans within recent days (more than 1 thousands) caused nearly same number of lower rank accounts created or woke up. Additionally, rises of bitcoin to suprass $7000 led to woke-up accounts of real users or bounty hunters or fudsters.

Yesterday, 400 users got banned. The day before, 300 users got banned.
Before that, there were about 50 bans per day. I keep track because of my banned users list, and every morning I see the total number of new bans.
Since yesterday, there are much more topics in Meta asking why they are banned, including a Russian speaking DT1 member.

[mk4]

Could it be some account farmers preparing for a spamfest now that Bitcoin Price looks a little good?

It is the most likely reason I think. Bitcointalk was a lot more active in the peak of the 2017 bubble. If we ever reach that height of price increases again, I expect Bitcointalk to get the same massive amounts of topics and replies back.

But yea, at least we now have the merit system. I think we're going to need a lot more admins/mods that can handle the reported posts though. Isn't Theymos planning on increasing the number of forum mods? That would help a lot to clean this forum in the next market boom.

[LoyceV]

I've seen a similar question before, that's why theymos added averages to seclog:

493 users/day in the last month, 395 users/day in the last year.

Last month, it's just 25% more than the last year.

[bitart]

I admit I haven't checked and googled yet, but:
Is there anything here for merits like we have for posts?
I mean, there's the patrol page for the new posts, but is there anything similar for new merits?
Like a merit patrol page?
It would be useful in the coming days, it the things in the above posts come true

[o_e_l_e_o]

Like a merit patrol page?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats

The closest page on the forum to what you are looking for would be the "Recent merits". It might be helpful in identifying an account which still has a bunch of airdropped merit suddenly starting to repeatedly hand out a single merit in an effort to rank up a bunch of alts. Loyce's page here (http://loyce.club/Merit/merit.html) would achieve the same thing.

@Coin-1 keeps a list of users who have given out the most merit to newbies each month here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5034141.0. His/her list might also help to identify accounts as above.

[nutildah]

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Or, may be some banned user using their alts and they would like to build their account again.

That could certainly be true, and I hadn't thought of that but it makes sense.  There have been tons of accounts banned lately, and we all know people don't usually just give up and go away once they're banned. 

Then again, it could be what I initially thought:  a bunch of members using their dormant alt accounts to ride the wave of the bitcoin bull run, which does tend to happen when bitcoin acts like it has in the past few weeks.  I'm not sure how vibrant the bounty business is these days, but there aren't that many bitcoin-paying signature campaigns around anymore, so it's not as though these accounts are joining those.  They might be used to bump ANN threads and other shady crap like that, but who knows.  I'm just hoping the shitposting/spam problem doesn't get worse as a result of all these reactivations.

[El duderino_]

They would need to rank up those accounts first. In that case we will see some unusual meriting soon.

Meriting will separate the good of the bad posters of those newbie accounts, and unusual behave of some merit senders as well....

[DdmrDdmr]

I’ve just gone over around a hundred or so of those woken-up accounts, and the once I checked were in the immense majority either Brand New accounts or Newbie accounts with one or just a few posts.

A priori, it would seem that they have little value over creating a Brand New account now, save for the fact that the woken-up accounts have an older creation date (which does not seem to be a benefit), and that they are evil-ip cleared, which might be the core benefit (for bot accounts for example).

[1miau]

They will join in different bounty campaigns but they can't join if they can't get any merit so merit sending to different alts will happen too.

Participation in other parts of altcoin campaigns is still possible for them, like Twitter and FB because bounty managers have no rule about the Bitcointalk rank there. The only thing they need is a high number of followers on their Twitter / FB accounts to earn stakes and if all shitposters add each other, they can get quite a few FB friends / followers. Twitter has something like Twitter audit to verify if the followers are real but I don't know if that's a reliable tool.

The good thing is that the bounty spam for reports will remain in altcoins / bounty if the accounts are mainly used for social media bounty.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

It is normal based on my past time series plot:

Or in my another topic: Time Series on monthly statistics of forum (new users, new topics, new posts)

Not sure how this is related to number of accounts waking up because in your stats, it's about account registrations.

What we are seeing right now is a scenario where old newbie and brand-new accounts that were mostly registered back in 2017, 2018 waking up lately.

[LogitechMouse]

It is normal based on my past time series plot:

Or in my another topic: Time Series on monthly statistics of forum (new users, new topics, new posts)

Not sure how this is related to number of accounts waking up because in your stats, it's about account registrations.

What we are seeing right now is a scenario where old newbie and brand-new accounts that were mostly registered back in 2017, 2018 waking up lately.

I think what he is saying is the amount of new registered accounts will increase aside from the accounts that were created in the past 2 years. I think also that the number of new accounts will increase too because of what is happening right now in the market.

Anyway, there is a somebody busy reporting those newbies. Maybe a bot or a bunch of users out there helping the mods to clean this forum. There will be a time that those users will be banned (MAYBE).

[tranthidung]

Not sure how this is related to number of accounts waking up because in your stats, it's about account registrations.

What we are seeing right now is a scenario where old newbie and brand-new accounts that were mostly registered back in 2017, 2018 waking up lately.

I understood what you implied but I pointed out that activities of crypto enthusiasts usually become more actively when bitcoin rising: more new registered accounts, more woke-up accounts, more scammers, more shitty projects launched, and so forth. My above charts present only new registered accounts, not woke-up ones, but the fact is nearly the same for woke-up accounts, I believe. In 2017, I saw some old accounts woke-up due to bitcoin all time high, and those ones are not hacked accounts. It's the point.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

I've seen a similar question before, that's why theymos added averages to seclog:

493 users/day in the last month, 395 users/day in the last year.

Last month, it's just 25% more than the last year.

1. Seven days later, the number of average users per day in the last month is almost twice the value that was quoted:

Code:

833 users/day in the last month, 417 users/day in the last year.

2. 22,951 Accounts have now woken up in the last one month, Also almost double the number of accounts i reported had woken up 7 days ago (12,369)

3. It's worthy noting some accounts that woke up in massive numbers were involved in the infamous fake Ann saga that was rampant a few days ago in the Altcoins Announcements board
The accounts seem to have been accessed by the hacker but passwords were not changed as some individuals complained about not posting any fake ANNs.

[tranthidung]

1. Seven days later, the number of average users per day in the last month is almost twice the value that was quoted:

Code:

833 users/day in the last month, 417 users/day in the last year.

2. 22,951 Accounts have now woken up in the last one month, Also almost double the number of accounts i reported had woken up 7 days ago (12,369)

How many of those recently woke-up accounts are Newbies, or Junior Members? It makes more sense if you can retrieve such data. 

[darklus123]

Then we should keep an eye to them. However I think most of them couldn't climb up the ladder unless they start making merit trades.  I just hope they will only continue to swarm up the alt threads if thats the case you shouldn't be worrying too much


I also got a suggestion, since you are interested with this topic and you are actually gaining data. Can you start creating the impact of the said zombie accounts?. You just have to make data on how are this zombie accounts acting after waking up.

[tranthidung]

Then we should keep an eye to them. However I think most of them couldn't climb up the ladder unless they start making merit trades.  I just hope they will only continue to swarm up the alt threads if thats the case you shouldn't be worrying too much


I also got a suggestion, since you are interested with this topic and you are actually gaining data. Can you start creating the impact of the said zombie accounts?. You just have to make data on how are this zombie accounts acting after waking up.

Most of them (woke-up newbies) will end with nukes, I believe. Because they most likely come from farm accounts, and they can not act better than spamming the forum. So, sooner or later, they will report by professional reporters, then if they will be found as farm accounts, they will be nuked. iasenko has a topic for such purpose (Spambuster club).  

[Bitcoin_Arena]

How many of those recently woke-up accounts are Newbies, or Junior Members? It makes more sense if you can retrieve such data.  

As of now.
1 - 22984 Accounts(All accounts including Newbie and brand new) woke up in the last one month
Average users per day (All accounts) is

Code:

833 users/day in the last month, 416 users/day in the last year.

2 - 1006 Ranked up accounts (Jr member to Legendary) woke up in the last one month
Average users per day (only ranked up accounts) is

Code:

48 users/day in the last month, 43 users/day in the last year.

3. This means 21978 Newbie and Brand New accounts woke up in the last one month.
This pretty much reflects that something is not right since the number of Newbie and brand new accounts that have just woken up is way too abnormal compared to all the other ranks combined.


I am not so technical with the data scraping thingy to sort out accounts that woke up per rank and comparing the data to the past one year but this is an interesting trend to follow with this bull market  

[Oyarebu]

How many of those recently woke-up accounts are Newbies, or Junior Members? It makes more sense if you can retrieve such data.  

~
I am not so technical with the data scraping thingy to sort out accounts that woke up per rank and comparing the data to the past one year but this is an interesting trend to follow with this bull market  

You have done a great job, base on your non-tech. knowledge for scraping of data, and was able to do wonderfully well. One can easily spot out these numbers between the recent woke-up accounts, keep it up  .

[darklus123]

Then we should keep an eye to them. However I think most of them couldn't climb up the ladder unless they start making merit trades.  I just hope they will only continue to swarm up the alt threads if thats the case you shouldn't be worrying too much


I also got a suggestion, since you are interested with this topic and you are actually gaining data. Can you start creating the impact of the said zombie accounts?. You just have to make data on how are this zombie accounts acting after waking up.

Most of them (woke-up newbies) will end with nukes, I believe. Because they most likely come from farm accounts, and they can not act better than spamming the forum. So, sooner or later, they will report by professional reporters, then if they will be found as farm accounts, they will be nuked. iasenko has a topic for such purpose (Spambuster club).  

Then if that's tha case there is no point in worrying about how they are going to make impact with the current situation.

Good thing really about right now is that there are more active patrollers right now unlike before. Tho, i am not sure if the jr.member accounts can be easily nuked or ban since that might involved actions from the staffs anymore

[LoyceV]

3. This means 21978 Newbie and Brand New accounts woke up in the last one month.
This pretty much reflects that something is not right since the number of Newbie and brand new accounts that have just woken up is way too abnormal compared to all the other ranks combined.

It could be related to the increase in Bitcoin price: say someone made an account a long time ago, saw Bitcoin in the news, searched for it, ended up on this forum again, and read a few posts. That's enough to label his account as "woke up", without ever posting anything.

[Rizzrack]

After a brain storming session, throwing ideas on the wall to see what sticks ... one of them is still on my wall.

Would consider useful if users that wake up would receive an e-mail alert. Something in the means of "Hello X, after a long period of time we noticed activity on your account. If you did not login, please use this link to temporary block your account / change password etc. If it was you please ignore"

This might help in cases where accounts get hacked after years on inactivity and used for all kind of wrong purposes 

[o_e_l_e_o]

This might help in cases where accounts get hacked after years on inactivity and used for all kind of wrong purposes  

It certainly might help in the cases where higher ranked or green trusted accounts are being hacked and used for scamming, but in the vast majority of cases like we are seeing at the moment with brand new and newbie accounts waking up to be used to spam, I suspect the original owner simply won't care enough to follow the link and lock their account.

[Rizzrack]

It certainly might help in the cases where higher ranked or green trusted accounts are being hacked and used for scamming, but in the vast majority of cases like we are seeing at the moment with brand new and newbie accounts waking up to be used to spam, I suspect the original owner simply won't care enough to follow the link and lock their account.

That was actually the point, tho there were cases when even if not well established ... "their username" was used on several websites / projects and would not want it to be associated with malicious behavior ... especially HERE