Spammer user registrations?

He has: 37 posts

Joined: May 2002

I have a lot of unused registrations, accounts that have never commented on an article. A lot of them registered with an e-mail addresses using the .ru domain? I am considering a clean up of these accounts - since they seem fishy...
Do spammers tend to register with .ru e-mails? Confused

greg's picture

He has: 1,581 posts

Joined: Nov 2005

Is it possible these account holders may just be reviewing/reading the articles?

I don't know your site requirements, but they may just be silent users getting information.
Maybe this is unacceptable within your TOS?

He has: 37 posts

Joined: May 2002

greg;221982 wrote: Is it possible these account holders may just be reviewing/reading the articles?

I don't know your site requirements, but they may just be silent users getting information.
Maybe this is unacceptable within your TOS?

That's fine. But out of 75 registered readers, nearly half are @mail.ru addys... exactly "mail.ru": http://www.mail.ru Only a few posts have been deleted by my spam catcher after three months publishing... but the accounts seem useless... like they were generated by some spam bot, not a human...

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I'm having the exact same problem on my blog. There's no need to register for it, so I don't know why I'm getting so many who aren't participating in any way. Mine are mostly mail.ru email address as well. I figured there must be a spammy reason behind it but I don't know what that is. Possibly they are bots that don't realize there is no members page or something.

He has: 37 posts

Joined: May 2002

I'm going to clean up my member list and delete the mail.ru stuff... it seems obvious - since you're getting them too - they must be spam bots. Apparently they register but then lose direction.

He has: 688 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

I used to get TONS of .ru registrations, several per day, usually from mail.ru in particular but sometimes other .ru domains. They're all spammers from Russia. I've never known whether they are low wage human spammers or automated bots but they almost always register but never post anything. They do this to add a link to their profile, which helps search engines find their dirty or illegal websites. Failing to remove them is basically letting them use you. Better than removing them, why not block them. I don't know about other forum software or blogs but phpBB has a simple way to ban all .ru registrations with a wildcard (and you're probably not losing much by blocking all of Russia). Even better than that, I use an add on which requires ALL new registrants to answer a simple question first. If it's a bot they can't register and if they're a human Russian then they question still fools them by being about my site's specific subject, which they don't know anything about.

Do yourself a favor and block all .ru registrations. Good luck.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

The stupid thing is that my site, and wordpress by default, has no user profile page or user profile link. Unless maybe there is one for people who actually comment... But regardless, the spammers on my site haven't even entered URL's. Must be a pretty stupid spambot Wink

It doesn't really hurt me that much to have them on there, since they are getting no value, but if it becomes more of aproblem I'll try to find a wordpress plugin to block those email addresses. For now I can delete them manually without too much trouble.

Has anyone seen gawab.com as a mail extension from spammers?

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