They trickle in three or four a day: new account requests for Talking T Gauge. Since moving to the new server three weeks ago, there's been over fifty of them. Who are all these people?
What people? These are fake accounts being created by software for the purpose of spamming the forum with advertising, mostly for drugs. These "people" include the likes of liecelsosturo, fiellaembappy, citblurbclich, burimbbuift, nekspeviple, and so on... I suspect these nonsense names are meant to somehow look possibly legitimate, as compared to ones that are not so subtle: PhentermineDrugs, BuyFinasteride or OnlineCIALIS.
Thankfully I have account creation for Talking T Gauge set to require administrative approval. Such is not the case for T Central Station, where membership appears to be growing by leaps and bounds—over 80 accounts so far and counting. Unfortunately, three quarters of them are spam accounts.
It's a sad state of affairs, not to mention a real PITA for forum administrators. Although most of these bogus applications are pretty obvious, occasionally there's a legitimate account request buried in the noise. What makes it challenging is that sometimes a real person will choose an oddball username, instead of something obviously real, which means I must carefully sift through every request I receive to screen for real people.
So, if you're thinking of joining Talking T Gauge, please be aware that your membership may take a while to be approved. You can speed this process by choosing a legitimate-looking username, such as JimJohnston or TGaugeFanatic5. If your membership is not activated within 48 hours, email me with your username, and I'll know to activate it right away.
I apologize in advance for making it harder to join the forum, but unfortunately it's necessary; otherwise, the forum would quickly be overrun with spammers. In their quest for that easy buck, spammers are ruining the Internet. And considering the majority of them are trying to sell erectile dysfunction drugs, it seems the root of the problem is the male sex drive.
It's a sad state of affairs, I know. From one forum admin to another: recaptcha really works, if there's a plugin to incorporate that into account creation.
ReplyDeleteActually, I've just modified the forum to include a question field that requires a human to answer. Seems to work quite well, and it was a simple mod.
ReplyDelete