It was a bot. Not a real person. Membership deleted.
We've had an influx of bots registering lately. I have to go in an manually delete each membership.
These are similar to the spiders that crawl their way through the internet and cause havoc, but these aren't causing havoc. Somebody writes a script which creates a spider to crawl the net and register at discussion boards like this with arbitrary names for the sole purpose of promoting their website, which is always a site which is selling something.
We require email activization of accounts and these accounts are never activized. I just delete them as I notice them.
This new upgrade of the software has protective features so a hack like we had a week ago should not happen again (that's what I'm told anyway).
What I need to do is add a modification. This will make it necessary for people who are registering to type the letters they see on the screen. I'm sure you've seen this before. There will be letters or numbers appearing on your screen in a box and you are required to type them in, in order to complete your registration.
Once I add the mod, these bots won't keep creating bogus memberships to spam our boards with links to websites which are selling anything from drugs to spyware.
The mod works..... why? Because bots can't read.
I've been meaning to add this for quite some time. I've just been too busy to get to it and so I take the few minutes to delete memberships like this as they come in, instead.
