New members/weird names??

[zbplayer]

Anyone notice the deluge of new members joining recently with weird names. Are they for real??? Well hello to them all,anyway. Regards Graham

[Arcada]

They are spam signups. There are usually 2 or 3 of these a day, and if they post a message it doesn't get approved and their account is deleted. Those that don't post a message remain, and it's these with the strange names that you see!

I don't want to go deleting all accounts with 0 posts as there are a lot of "lurkers" who might be interested in the topics, have registered, but haven't got around to posting. But the minute a spammer posts spam, they are gone!

If it gets out of hand I might occasionally have a purge of accounts with 0 posts, maybe those which are 3 months or older...

[STEDDIE EDDIE]

yeah i noticed that too, and to add to suspicions, not one of them has posted, or introduced themselves, or even used the forum to sell gear, as some new members do, before dissapearing forever, very strange, cos they dont need to become members to view the forum,

[STEDDIE EDDIE]

Sorry Arcada, i posted before i saw your reply, so these 'spammers' ? what are they after? personal info? without going into detail, what do their attempted posts consist of? puzzled! ??????????????????????????????????

[Arcada]

Sorry Arcada, i posted before i saw your reply, so these 'spammers' ? what are they after? personal info? without going into detail, what do their attempted posts consist of? puzzled! ??????????????????????????????????

They're just trying to post links to sell their Viagra, Cialis, fake Nikes or whatever else they have. Their posts are usually trash, sometimes there's a web link in their profile but since search engines (or any unregistered visitors) can't view profiles there's no benefit to this.

Re personal information - information such as your username, location, real name, facebook, youtube, etc. (if you entered these) are visible to everyone, registered or not, including search engines. This is because that info is displayed on the bit on the right when you make a post ---->

Depending on your profile settings your email address may be visible to other registered users, which would include these spammers. This can be changed at ucp.php?i=prefs&mode=personal.

[Uncle Roy]

Well done Arcada.

[Admin]

Suddenly we had a lot of Russian Steel Players!?? And I've yet to meet one Marc, mind you if she's size 8 .... I could be interested

[STEDDIE EDDIE]

more likely to be a Russian shot putter rather than a Russian shot jackson methinks
perhaps they suffer too much with cabinet andropov? ? ?

sorry about that, i Moscow to bed now, dont mean to be russian off !

[ZBSD-10]

I also noticed the wierd names of "new" members and thought the same as Eddie, Richard and Roy but tell
me, does this now mean we don't have the true amount of members shown at the bottom of the home page,it
seemed to me that when one of these "malacas" ( if you want to know what that means send me a private message !)
joined the total was amended showing us that we have more members than we actually have, no big deal really, I just
fancied doing some typing !
All the best from a warm (15C), sunny Corfu
Frank. Corfu

[Arcada]

Idoes this now mean we don't have the true amount of members shown at the bottom of the home page

Unfortunately yes it does. It currently says 200 members, but a lot of these have zero posts. It's safe to assume most of these zero posters are spammers who haven't validated their account (probably due to an invalid email address given).

Currently, there are 122 members who have posted and can be considered 100% genuine, although a few of these are the same people with duplicate accounts