codalab / codalab/codabench

Influx of spam participant joiners

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Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

In the last 12h or so, I've had a lot of spammy usernames join an ongoing competition (https://www.codabench.org/competitions/4345/).

They all have email addresses which look to be programatically created at 2925 . com

I could change the competition settings to require authorisation, but then I would need to wade through the emails generated to identify any genuine join requests, which seems like a worse option than simply ignoring them.
I don't know what they might be hoping to achieve (other than annoying me!) but I have denied the access for the ones I could see. Incidentally, this probably doesn't need to generate an email notification to the competition organiser for every individual user I've revoked!

Is there anything which can be done to prevent this, or at least make managing it less time-consuming?

Thanks

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Research direction

No implementation files or tests are named. Begin by tracing the competition join, authorization or revocation, and organiser-notification flows described in the report. Done should include a bounded mitigation for abusive joins and less burdensome notification handling without making legitimate requests unmanageable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
authorization, backend, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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