Nobody in particular. But you have to admit that it is a very odd happening here. Which leads me (if nobody else) to believe that they are being generated by something or someone.
I just don't understand why? It makes me sad
Nobody in particular. But you have to admit that it is a very odd happening here. Which leads me (if nobody else) to believe that they are being generated by something or someone.
I just don't understand why? It makes me sad
First, I can assure you that we are not generating fake accounts.
I have been skeptical of some of the new members as well. Over the past few weeks, I have stiffened our already tough anti spam countermeasures. One of the countermeasures we have been using is checking IPs against a database of known spammers. This database is updated by participating forums such as CR. When a spammer is identified, the IP is submitted to the database so that they can't sign up on other sites.
On Saturday, I changed a few things around...including renaming the default file name of the registration page so that forum spam bots couldn't automatically find that page. I also changed the security question which apparently I made too easy...given the number that we had sign up. I realized around 8pm Saturday evening that we were getting a lot of new users and actually turned off the ability to register until I could change the security question to a captcha image. With registrations turned back on, we are still getting a lot of new registrations despite the tougher captcha.
It is nearly impossible to tell whether new accounts are legit or not. I'm with you in that it seems they are not. However, I have received pms from some new users that I would have guessed to be spammers based on the odd user name, etc. which indicates they are legit. Thus, mass deleting all new registrations probably isn't a great option.
I am continuing to work on stiffening our spam defenses. I have also removed the Meet and Greet forum from displaying when you click "Whats New". Whether or not these are legit, I think that many welcome threads is overwhelming the other discussions.