[openstreetmap-website] suppress creating accounts by bots/scripts (#1083)

[malenki]

Having had a look at user accounts created from November 05 to 09 (that is, during the last 108 hours) there are 11318 accounts. A simple 

    grep _name *| cut -d '"' -f 4| grep -E -i "[a-z][0-9]{1,3}" -c 

gives 6576 occurrences of names like this: 

	William925i6f
	William925i6fs0
	William936f5an8
	William937j8ka4
	William937l8mc4
	William937l8md4
	William937m8n9
	William939v1zr0
	William947m8n
	William947r3yu4
	William948v2wd6
	William959x5if7
	William962h2ro1
	William975o4he9
	William9b2h1dn8
	William9f7j7ja4
	William9i4d2kx5
	William9l9f5px2
	William9o3k6uf1
	William9q0q0qf6
	William9q9l8hu1
	William9q9o9nc4
	William9r0o8jx2
	William9r1t1tk6
	William9s1t9pg6
	William9s1u0tj7
	William9s2s0cs2

There are also some false positives, but a more strict

    grep _name *| cut -d '"' -f 4| grep -E -i "[a-z][0-9]{1,3}[a-z][0-9]{1,3}" -c
still has 4367 hits. Looking for names with spam in them:

    grep _name *| egrep -i "premium|cash|bank|credit|mobil|phone|handy|pharma|viagra|free|generic" -c
gives a quite meagre 30 results.

With the above I only want to show that at least during the last four days around 50% of the newly registered accounts seem to be created by bots/scripts and assumedly won't be used for the benefit of OSM. Instead of having to remove these users by hand by admins it would spare work if they had a harder time to register accounts using scripts.

I know that it is easy to say "I'd like to have" but hard to solve the issue. Though I hope you can find a solution.

See also: #841
[My dairy entry](http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/malenki/diary/36268) resulting in this issue.
The data sample I used you can find [here](http://malenki.ch/OSM/data/user_accounts.7z).

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1083
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