Is the forum being compromised by bot accounts?

[Merlon.]

In the period Jan 1 2010 to March 18 2010 139 additional logins were created for the forum
In the period Jan 1 2011 to March 18 2011 1237 additional logins were created for the forum

Huzzah you say, lots of extra members. In fact since about October the membership of this forum has nearly doubled in size.
However when you look at the types of names being used, they majority of them are gibberish names as you would expect to be created by a Bot program.
There have been examples recently of major spamming being done by seeming bot accounts, Hunadong43 and Huangdon59 being good examples.
There have been comments about individual users accounts having password lockouts which may have been the subject of hack attempts.
Wondering if the mods and admin had noticed this trend?

[Phil the Grips]

yep- we spend a large part of the day clearing out spam and dubious accounts, and refering repeat offenders on to be blocked, though it goes through peaks and troughs.

Hopefully we get it right but we are only humand and peak "away from screen" time such as weekends with events and fairs always means that things become a bit more noticable for users until we can get the virtual dustpan and brush out.

The recent login hacks seems to have been a phenomenon that occurred in several places not just here and is a timely reminder for folk to change their passwords often.

[guthrie]

Its not so much compromised as getting in the way of everything.
I've taken to banning new members before they event post, as they are clearly spammers. It would be nice to remove their names from the members list altogether.

[SteveC]

You should be able to delete members, but from experience, it can be a full time occupation if you're not careful!

S

[guthrie]

I don't know if banning actually removes them completely from the list of members. I'm quite happy to get some jollies from banning a thousand people over a month if it makes a difference.

[Alice the Huswyf]

The moderators started sorting the membership list out some time ago, but, as you say the present onslaught means that we have had to go back and re-do the work we had already carried out.

As you can see from each header everywhere we are asking those genuine members who prefer to lurk to either make one post somewhere or to contact me by PM if they prefer to retain their privacy. And they have started to trickle forward. However this clearance is a huge and complex job (with checks to ensure we don't brand the innocent) , so bear with us.

[Lord High Everything Esle]

Looks like its time for application approval.

I have an automatic questionnaire that goes to all my applications:

How did you find out about this site?

What is your interest in Living History?

What is you interest in the History of Medicine?

Any application that does not give a reasonable reply gets dumped with a nice rejection note.