Lots of new users are all spammers!

Am I the only one that noticed a large number of new users with all-uppercase usernames have registered with websites in their profiles that point to online drug websites?

These are obviously spammers.

When will we get a better registration method that prevents automated registration?

That’d be up to kurtis. I personally have a vendetta against spammers on Haiku’s forums, so if you spot one - spam or spammer - let me know and I’ll be glad to cough remedy the situation. Most of it appears to be the work of one particular spammer because it’s generally from Russia and almost always for one drug in particular.

Here’s another one to squash.

Meanwhile wrote:
Here's another one to squash.

Oh, there are at least 10 of them that start with “B” – if you just sort the memberlist by join date descending and go through all-uppercase names one at a time, you’ll see the ones with websites in their profiles that are obvious spammers.

umccullough wrote:
Meanwhile wrote:
Here's another one to squash.

Oh, there are at least 10 of them that start with “B” – if you just sort the memberlist by join date descending and go through all-uppercase names one at a time, you’ll see the ones with websites in their profiles that are obvious spammers.

Whoops, I didn’t know but realize now they probably have to start spamming before they can be removed from the list…

I just spent somewhere around half an hour nuking the accounts of any user which was obviously an auto-generated spammer account. These were almost without fail a username that had some random numbers tacked on the end, had 0 posts, and the only other info aside from a faked e-mail address was the URL to some website. As it turns out, I was right in saying that it was mostly the responsibility of one spammer - a very large proportion of them came from one Russian domain which has since been banned. It probably won’t stay that way for long, but I’ll try to keep on top of things as I am able.

Hope you got some satisfaction out of that half hour…it’s appreciated!

were they all at one domain name?

we probably need to start blocking some more of the free email sites =/

I also updated phpBB2, just in case it was a vulnerablity with the previous version …

I enabled the visual confirmation mod. Hopefully this will deter the spammers from making pointless accounts.

yeh good thinking 99 …