Even though registration is supposed to go through The Entity, I notice that a lot of the “members” are spam links with connections to online pharmacies. No harm, no foul though they do clog the memberlist and artificially inflate numbers.
Our latest member has a web link that I don’t dare click. “Gang rape” in a url is generally a bad sign.
This is not, of course, a serious or crippling issue but it is one that I find personally irritating.
(Don’t mind me. I’m avoiding work.)
Troy
Something tells me they registered only because of unpatched phpBB exploits :?
Don’t they have to actually post though? I don’t really check out peoples websites unless they’ve posted.
As TSG says, it’s more of a personal irritation (rather than an immediate and serious issue), mostly because the purpose of the junk memberships is simply to provide a link in their profile that Google can scan and count as a “vote” for their pagerank based on Qt3’s own pagerank.
If anything, configuring the junk account creation program to only create the account but never post makes it less likely for a site admin to notice and remove the account.
One of the upgrades removed the number guessing bit. Guess I should put it back in… still thinking about the big conversion.
Meanwhile you could delete all the users with a post count of 0 ;). What are you converting to, phpBB 3.0 cvs?