Influx of Spam Accounts

[Gendou]

Not sure if this is new, or if they just come in waves, but it seems we have a recent influx of spam accounts.
Since they can't post links, they spam the required ten posts, with the advertised URL in their sig and 'web' link.
If you see these, please be sure to report them.

I'm not sure what else the admins can do to prevent them from posting - they're very persistent.

[Breanni]

I'm not sure what else the admins can do to prevent them from posting - they're very persistent.

Indeed they are.

Each time we discover one of these spammers, we purge all of their posts, delete their account and then ban the IP address. Most of them are coming from Indonesia. Why on earth they want to advertise kitchenware on an American game-based pet site is beyond me.

So, yes, be vigilant and PLEASE report them. We will remove each and every one. Hopefully they'll eventually understand that their efforts are futile.

We might also consider raising the necessary post count to 20 before allowing links, though I honestly doubt that would stop them and I hate to punish genuine members of our community.

[Gendou]

We might also consider raising the necessary post count to 20 before allowing links, though I honestly doubt that would stop them and I hate to punish genuine members of our community.

I wish I were more experienced in working with Blizzard's Web API.
I imagine there's a way to do account verifications using pets via the armory.

Like the sites that say, "Remove this armor and equip this armor" for verification.
Only for us, it would be, "Set your active pet team to this, this and this."

Unfortunately, I've no idea if it's even possible to implement something like that, let alone how difficult it would be.

[Tahsfenz]

Why about doing a blanket block for those regions? Unless there are users from there. Aside from having to manually approve everyone tat join.

[Waveryn]

Not sure how your admin panel works Brian, I am an admin on a very large Vbullitin Community and we stopped much of this by making all new registered members be put on moderated posting, none of their posts are ever seen by the public this way (bye bye porn) until a moderator approves, this also lets us find any robots or spammers that beat the registrant security and simply ban them. After 10 posts or so an admin can change their status to regular poster.

[Gendou]

Not sure how your admin panel works Brian, I am an admin on a very large Vbullitin Community and we stopped much of this by making all new registered members be put on moderated posting, none of their posts are ever seen by the public this way (bye bye porn) until a moderator approves, this also lets us find any robots or spammers that beat the registrant security and simply ban them. After 10 posts or so an admin can change their status to regular poster.

That's the way we did it on my guild's forums when we got an influx of spammers.
But that's an awful lot of work for the volunteers, and it's discouraging for new posters to not be able to post immediately.