Bogus registrations

Fido

Fido

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6,286
Location
New Forest, England.
For my shaving blog, I've kept a record of the numbers on several shaving forums over the past two years. In the past few months I've noticed some evidence of bogus registrations including here. I'm not sure what I mean by this - someone registering with no intention of posting?

What is the point of this practice? And how can it be stopped or discouraged?
 
Spammers trying for search engine optimisation. They register with online forums and create signatures which advertise web pages.

Sometimes they post sometimes they don't but the search engine bots, spiders and crawlers search through members and and posts and the more times they come across the link the higher they get in the search results.

For this reason many forums restrict the ability to create a signature, sometimes permanently sometimes to a specific post count.
 
Fido said:
For my shaving blog, I've kept a record of the numbers on several shaving forums over the past two years. In the past few months I've noticed some evidence of bogus registrations including here. I'm not sure what I mean by this - someone registering with no intention of posting?

What is the point of this practice? And how can it be stopped or discouraged?
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A lot of forums this one included restrict areas so only members can see, like vendors offers and the such, so even though the people might not be posting they may still be reading/visiting a lot. I am members of a lot of places I dont post just register as a courtesy

Plus the spam thing from jeltz
 
Question on what should be done. I have very limited knowledge in these areas; for my personal protection when I use free WiFi hotspots I use either Hotspotshield or vpnvip. For a site like TSR should there be a vulnerability scanner program used to evaluate network weaknesses? As it's part of 'Tapatalk' is that program already installed by them as the site administrator ??
 
Johnus said:
Question on what should be done. I have very limited knowledge in these areas; for my personal protection when I use free WiFi hotspots I use either Hotspotshield or vpnvip. For a site like TSR should there be a vulnerability scanner program used to evaluate network weaknesses? As it's part of 'Tapatalk' is that program already installed by them as the site administrator ??
Click to expand...

Well Hotspotshield & VPNVIP will protect your information on the open wireless but it will do nothing to harden your machine against attack (so the ne'er-do-wells can still break into your device... rendering the VPN useless)

As for sites like this - well our current host has a pretty paranoid firewall around it to mitigate against network-level intrusions. I've 'set it off' more than once and the effect is that he gets paged instantly and you remain blocked for a period. As for bogus registrations, we get a few but usually they're spotted quickly and stamped out before there's any damage - there are countermeasures in place (and more being looked at) but you have to strike a balance between easy registration allowing scammers & spammers and a tortuous process that would deter the casually interested viewer.

Spambots filling a site is typically the result of inattentive or naive administrators, either not putting in place countermeasures or not configuring them with sufficient paranoia.
 
Thank you. You bring up a excellent point . While I have the wifi shields in place on my phone, I never thought about a firewall. Need to check on that!
 
The spammers use automatic registration software but, these days, also have a human on site to complete captcha questions and such like. So even the counter measures can only go so far.

When they start using dynamic IP addresses its harder to block keep so it has to be a reactive system rather than proactive.
 
Johnus said:
Question on what should be done. I have very limited knowledge in these areas; for my personal protection when I use free WiFi hotspots I use either Hotspotshield or vpnvip. For a site like TSR should there be a vulnerability scanner program used to evaluate network weaknesses? As it's part of 'Tapatalk' is that program already installed by them as the site administrator ??
Click to expand...

Black helicopters. Watch out for the black helicopters. They'll steal your children and credit card details, and your children's credit card details if they have them.
 
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