Forum Spammers
As many have you have undoubtedly noticed, we've been inundated with spammers attempting to join the board - hence all the new wacky usernames you've seen. This is a collection of people using a "bot" - software that they pre-fill with names, email addresses, websites and quite a bit of other details. The software is even capable of reading the "Captcha" images upon registration. You haven't seen any actual spam on the board as I have been manually approving all accounts and banning the spammers on the spot utilizing a known spammer ban list.
I've now installed software that will automatically cross reference a database that contains IP's, emails and usernames of known spammers. Should it be referenced, the account won't even be created and the spammer will be shown a message telling them as much. Hopefully this will do the trick but I am going to leave new registrations moderated for now until I see how it performs.
In no way, shape or form are any of these "members" able to get anything from this board other than a post spamming their services. All member information here is perfectly secure. This is just simply an automated way for spammers to bulk spam forums throughout the internet.
