Community, Safety, and Trust | Platypus, the blog of the Humanities Commons team

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Kathleen Fitzpatrick Earlier this month, the Modern Language Association held its annual convention, and our team hoped that we would be able to engage with attendees, helping them continue their conversations with one another via the Commons. Instead, we found ourselves fending off what initially looked like a bot attack: a massive influx of new account creation attempts with a few shared characteristics that made clear that there was orchestration involved. We put some measures in place to attempt to ensure that the majority of these attempts did not succeed, and spent several days playing whack-a-mole with the few that did. In the process, it gradually came to seem that we might not be dealing with bots, but with humans: bad actors who were trying to find ways into the Commons community. To what end, we weren’t sure. But given the visibility of the MLA Convention, we really, really did not want to find out. Things have gotten a bit quieter since the convention ended, but the suspicious account creation attempts continue. And fighting off this attack has taken all of the time that might have gone into the work we’re trying to do to improve and advance the platform, and it’s left our very small team exhausted. So we’re discussing some longer-term options, options that raise a few key questions we’d like to open up for discussion with the Commons community. [...]