I agree. I have been watching the spam accounts come in literally by the minute.

I’ve been reporting spam comments as I see them, but it’s troubling that they can still have a bunch of links in their profile without making any posts. I’d like to help out with that if there’s any way I can. Probably I am too new of a user to have admin privileges, but if it would be helpful, I’m happy to throw together a script that will make a list of likely spam accounts based on common indicators (long link lists in the bio, certain keywords, lack of languages or sentences, etc). Then some admin can run through the list and delete the ones they see fit.

EDIT: just realized that user bios aren’t included in the downloadable data dumps, so maybe that won’t work.

Waldelfe, I understand your concern. I am aware of the constant influx of spammy accounts, and be sure that I am willing to stop it. But this is not an easy task.

About adding a confirmation email step, I think it’s is unlikely to help. According to my own research, these accounts are created by humans. They are already going through as many open-registration websites as possible, to create user pages containing a lot of links (see, for example, user xx88art56). Tatoeba is likely the only website in 2025 not requiring email confirmation. If they can do it on other websites which require email confirmation, they will keep doing it on Tatoeba regardless of email confirmation.

About adding a captcha, I don’t think the benefits of the captcha (less spam accounts that are barely noticeable) outweigh the drawbacks (less legitimate users are able to register). Besides, captchas are unlikely to stop the spammers because they are likely real humans.

You are welcome to join the ongoing discussion about prevention of spam accounts on GitHub: https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1613

Hello, thank you for all your contributions to this project!

Hello, thanks for your reply. Mostly I mean African and Indigenous languages. If you go to the all languages section, you will find many that have less than 10 phrases like Urhobo, Aymara, Haida, Cuyonon to mention some.

By the way, I also have Indian languages. In the past I studied some Kannada, which is a Dravidian language, it has an amazing alphabet, quite artistic.

Now going back to the main topic, I think we might capture some people via social media. It's the idea I have now. On Facebook you may find lots of groups that promote polyglottery and defend minority languages.