In the last half hour or so, it appears that somebody created a tag team of six (perhaps more) zombies, and set them loose in the epic meta thread launched by Kos. It also appears that said zombies have also been neutralized. Details of zombie-crushing action follow, along with some questions.
Zombie outbreak
Somewhat incendiary stuff was posted from several new accounts - at the same time with mutual uprates between these accounts. Here's where it started.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Accounts involved were banhammered into oblivion promptly:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
With a little bit of digging around, I found a couple more newly-made and freshly-banned accounts:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
(more exist).
Questions
I have several, and I would perhaps appreciate some attention from the site developers to the third one.
- Why didn't anybody think of this (massively parallel sock attack) before? Or did they?
- Does anybody know who is behind this? There are several famous serial zombies... Update: According to elfling, the zombie has been identified.
- Is there any way to prevent something like this from happening in the future? Perhaps limit the number of new accounts one can register from same IP number within a time interval?
- Should these be called sockpuppets, zombies, trolls, or some combination thereof?
3:40 PM PT: Check comments for reference to a similar outbreak yesterday!
3:43 PM PT: Major props to Daily Kos technical team for dealing with the matter. Sadly, the community moderation cannot repel such an attack on its own.
9:11 PM PT: Four Six more zombies showed up in this diary... to be insta-bojoed:
999161
999155
999174
999198
991367
666000
What a waste of a user ID number. The last zombie actually came from a different graveyard than the rest.
And so the futile toils of the undead continue, and this diary, surprisingly, works as a honeypot.