Site announcements and information discussion

Does anyone else see it? According to their profiles, all these loan-spamming knuckleheads seem to have joined around September 20th of 2012. Is that coincidence meaningful? Was there a full moon then, or was the asylums and institutions clearing out beds en masse at that time?! o_O

slave It happened when the site got updated in September 2012 and had some security glitches. A flood of them came through, and Admin knocked many out back then. Others didn't post at all, making it harder to clear them off the list since they hadn't done anything wrong yet. The giveaway is that their Fetlife name is often just a number. Let's hope Admin gets back online soon to sort this mess:)

I think it's the same person behind all of them. They seem to log in once or twice daily and drop a single message into the same thread. Their login times are clustered together as well. As I've said before, every time they post with a link, search engines start tying this site more closely to payday loans rather than chastity. If you Google "chastity" now, our mansion isn't in the first 20 pages. I gave up trying to track when it does appear. But if you search for "payday loans," the community shows up on page 17 (or at least it did this morning). The more links they push, the stronger that association becomes. Other sites have waited until their rankings were high and then hijacked traffic. The admin needs to ban their IP addresses and emails so they can't get in. The only surefire way is vetting every new member before posting, but that costs a lot of man-hours.

Or maybe we all just take out loans with them and stop paying! (just kidding);)

I don't mind being vetted, giggle.

vetted?

> h said: > vetted? > Click to expand... The suggestion was that we should vet folks so the spammers get stopped. I don't mind being vetted.

It's not really one person creating lots of names; it's a script attacking forums at random. It then brute-forces the site with randomly generated usernames until some slip through. Our system blocks tons of them every day, but some get in. Since you are all registered, you probably don't see this, but we have two verification steps before acceptance. First, you answer two questions and type the correct reply. Second, a random image appears, and you must identify it correctly. Aside from manually approving people (which is time-consuming and discourages sign-ups because they have to wait), there isn't much else we can do. It doesn't look very welcoming:)

> slave stroppy said: > Has anyone else noticed that according to their profiles all these knob head loan spam tossers all appeared to join in september 2012 around 20th approx............is this significant? was there a full moon that period or was it a period of time when the asylums and institutions were having a mass clearout of the beds!. o_O > Click to expand... I might be mistaken, but wasn't that around the time all those scandals broke in Washington...LOL