Is this site about to get an influx of SPAM?

[ThinkAnarchy]

I have been inactive for a bit, but I have been noticing a bunch of new users with numbers behind their SN's who have links in their profile...

I clicked on three in the "who's online now" thing, and they all had links to ad sites or products in their profile.

There were also over 20 registered users logged on today at one point.

I think something may be up. Perhaps I'm just paranoid, but I doubt it.

[Medusa]

It's been that way every single night since I signed up. 

[ThinkAnarchy]

It's been that way every single night since I signed up. 

I have noticed a lot too, but what I'm seeing makes me think a whole bunch are signing up at once. I think it may be a coordinated attack by trolls in the disguise of spammers.

[ThinkAnarchy]

I'm telling you, something is in the works, we are at 20 right now and most are new...

I think someone has declared war at another site.

The Mad Prophet sees all.

[Medusa]

I'm telling you, something is in the works, we are at 20 right now and most are new...

I think someone has declared war at another site.

The Mad Prophet sees all.

It's about 20 a night every night. Same ol same ol.

[ThinkAnarchy]

I'm telling you, something is in the works, we are at 20 right now and most are new...

I think someone has declared war at another site.

The Mad Prophet sees all.

It's about 20 a night every night. Same ol same ol.

Guess I've been inactive longer than I realized.

[Tank]

There are hundreds of new users signing up every day and they are almost all are spammers of some sort. Some IP addresses have 20+ and some 50+ users associated with them. I spent 40 minutes cleaning up this morning banning the ones that were online, about 40 IP's related to about 200 psudo users. But not a single post between them, which I find odd.

[ThinkAnarchy]

There are hundreds of new users signing up every day and they are almost all are spammers of some sort. Some IP addresses have 20+ and some 50+ users associated with them. I spent 40 minutes cleaning up this morning banning the ones that were online, about 40 IP's related to about 200 psudo users. But not a single post between them, which I find odd.

Sounds about right. I googled one of the SN's and it was assigned to at least 5 boards, registered this month, and not a single post on either board.

As to your problems, that is why I've never even wanted to be offered a Mod position at any of the boards I've frequented.

I think they are banking on not getting banned and hoping people click on the links through their profiles.

Just a thought.

[Tank]

There are hundreds of new users signing up every day and they are almost all are spammers of some sort. Some IP addresses have 20+ and some 50+ users associated with them. I spent 40 minutes cleaning up this morning banning the ones that were online, about 40 IP's related to about 200 psudo users. But not a single post between them, which I find odd.

Sounds about right. I googled one of the SN's and it was assigned to at least 5 boards, registered this month, and not a single post on either board.

As to your problems, that is why I've never even wanted to be offered a Mod position at any of the boards I've frequented.

I think they are banking on not getting banned and hoping people click on the links through their profiles.

Just a thought.

I agree with you because I have no idea what other benefit they gain unless Google et al use links in the site ranking process.

[The Magic Pudding]

The Male/Female ratio in stats was questioned a few months back when it was 19:1
It's now 86:1

[ThinkAnarchy]

The Male/Female ratio in stats was questioned a few months back when it was 19:1
It's now 86:1

How do you see that ratio?

EDIT: Never mind, I just found it.

[Xjeepguy]

I used to own a forum a few years back. The tactics they use are pretty interesting albeit annoying. They open as many user accounts as they can over time, let them lay dormant for weeks, even months, then out of nowhere you wind up with so much spam at one time it takes time to delete it all. That way it stays up longer.

The way I handled it was to not delete their accounts, I simply created a usergroup just for them, and had a VB add-on called "miserable users" which made their accounts pretty much useless. It would lag horribly, constantly redirect, time out, they couldnt make posts, although they didnt know that. It was just something to torture them. One guy tried for over 2 hours to make a post. Once they gave up, I would purge the usergroup, and begin repopulating it with the next batch of spammers. This only works when they are easily identifiable, usually with spam links in their sigs, or sometimes by their username.

[Whitney]

it is normal...when we switched over to SMF we lost our extensive list of banned IP addresses so it's just going to take time to build that up again. 

If we were being attacked the site would already be down because I think those that do that kind of stuff already know how to quickly take down a forum.

Every so often when I'm bored I go through the userlist and ban accounts that are spam otherwise I don't worry about them if they aren't posting...most of them just signed up for the backlink to their website because dumb people seem to think that will help their rank even though the topics here have nothing to do with what they are selling.

[Will]

If you see spam, hit the report button. I get an email instantly, then I delete it and ban the user (and the IP, if it's a repeat offender). Spam really isn't a problem anymore.