Escape Artists

Administrivia => Support Desk => Topic started by: breitenb on February 18, 2016, 04:11:57 PM

Title: Vanishing forum registration?
Post by: breitenb on February 18, 2016, 04:11:57 PM
Hi... this is at least the fourth time I've registered as a user and had my account disappear within a day?  Password reminder requests give "user does not exist" messages.  Yet, when I register again as if from new, my security question is still there from the lats time. 
Title: Re: Vanishing forum registration?
Post by: Fenrix on February 18, 2016, 04:29:53 PM
Any account that is created and does not make a post is assumed a spambot and deleted. Have you posted with each of the prior ones? You've made a post now so this one shouldn't disappear.
Title: Re: Vanishing forum registration?
Post by: breitenb on February 18, 2016, 04:49:13 PM
Thanks! 
Title: Re: Vanishing forum registration?
Post by: Typhon on September 13, 2017, 04:06:34 PM
Posting here to avoid a third account deletion of my own, as I just discovered this thread. Shouldn't there be some kind of notification after account registration saying a post is required to avoid account deletion? And moreover, if an account doesn't post anything, is that not the very opposite of the behavior expected from a spambot?
Title: Re: Vanishing forum registration?
Post by: eytanz on September 13, 2017, 04:39:49 PM
I agree that it's unfortunate that there's no notification that accounts will be deleted. There used to be a message sent to all new members that they have to post, but then a server change broke that functionality and we have been unable to restore it. I should check with our tech staff to see if that's been fixed in the meanwhile.

As for the behaviour, there are many types of bots. One very common one in forums just creates accounts then plugs in links in the account information and never posts. I'm not sure what the purpose is - either hope forum users notice the account and check out the links, or more likely, they're trying to manipulate the link's SEO by making Google find it on lots of unrelated forums and therefore appear legit. Either way, there are many, many such accounts created every day, and if we don't delete them our member list fills with porn and malware links.

Another issue is that our forum does not allow links to be posted in your very first post. So many spambots create an account, try to post links and get prevented from doing so, and eventually give up, leaving an account behind. There is no way for us to easily find these accounts using forum logs.

Because of both of these behaviours, we find that an account that is created and that doesn't post is almost certainly a bot - we deleted about 1000 non-posting accounts per month, and the amount of real people caught up by that (that we know of) is about 2-3 per year. Almost everyone who joins our forums posts within 24 hours of creating the account anyway.
Title: Re: Vanishing forum registration?
Post by: hlf on September 25, 2017, 06:35:05 PM
post