There have been a steady stream of users registering* that have names made up of nonsensical letters randomly capitalized. None of them have posted at all. Does anyone know anything about this?

* On this forum obviously.

yep. quite common. in a month or two we might see some spam posts show up. then the accounts might get deleted.

That or they are just using us for the games. Seems to be a trend of that since we don't charge to join.

Yeah, but a lot of boards based on phpbb engines get über-spammed by fake profiles, as you can add a link to your own website, it counts as a hit for things like google and improves your page ranking. It sucks, but there are ways round it...

Maybe it's time for captchas when signing up?

Edit to add: One of the other forum's I am on has a captcha on sign up and one for the very first post you make.

Good theory - but none of the 'fake' accounts have website links...

And shouldn't this thread be in the temple?

It would fit there better than here...

[quote:525744a8ed="Electric_Man"][quote:525744a8ed="Katcal"]Yeah, but a lot of boards based on phpbb engines get über-spammed by fake profiles, as you can add a link to your own website, it counts as a hit for things like google and improves your page ranking. It sucks, but there are ways round it...[/quote:525744a8ed]
Good theory - but none of the 'fake' accounts have website links...[/quote:525744a8ed]
Well no because you can't enter one when you sign up, but dumb spam engines don't always notice that...

Ah, didn't realise that. I really can't remember what I was asked for when I signed up - so long ago... yet not even two years.

I hate captchas, I always find them really hard to read. And yes, this would be better in the Temple. I'll move it there.

[quote:822284cc91="Buzzfloyd"]I hate captchas, I always find them really hard to read. [/quote:822284cc91]

That's kind of the point of Captcha's, isn't it?

Anyway, there are some ways too make easily readable captcha's.
Some just ask you to type in the 2nd, 4th and 6th letter in a perfectly readable picture.

We can't really do anything more about these spam sign ups (captchas can be circumvented by cunning spambots) with this system, I've already taken away any advantage they might get from doing it - such as as the free website link. They don't do anything other than look stupid in the member list: eruXZ39wuiwzz etc. I was periodically deleting them as they signed up, but this gets a bit tedius so I'll probaly delete them from the database once a month or something.

I don't think it's a big deal at the moment but I have thought of migrating to a different system that has better handling for this sort of thing. There's always going to be a bit of spam though no matter what we use.

I don't want to make anyone paranoid but there's a fairly clever little bot that signs up and makes a post on some boards because the creators know that some people stop you having a website link in the member lists until you make a post. They say things like: "Hi everyone, what a great site this is. Speak to you soon." So you're never quite sure if it's a bot or just a bit of an idiot.

Mal, if this board is as I seem to remeber based on a mixture of PHPBB and some other stuff, the best way around the spambots I have found so far is by renaming the sign-up page, it's always the same filename, and they go looking for that. It was a radical cure for my forum, and I was getting up to 10 new spambers per day... Just make sure you replace all calls to the page in question in the other places, and it'll be fine...

To me, it doesn't seem like that big a deal, since the names are such dead giveaways. I think shillers and spammers like The_Khan are more of a genuine issue.

I just looked at The_Khan's posts and it's kind of funny how bad he is at pretending to fit in with the community.