Signature Spammer Bot?

A pest on forums.

[helleborine]

In the past two or three weeks I have noticed an exponential increase in "signature spam" where registrants that NEVER POST, simply include a link to their websites in a signature.

My IPB forum has always disallowed bb code or html in signatures, so they are wasting their time.

I started to recognize the login names of some of the spammers showing up on several unrelated forums.

Googling one of these login names yielded 140K pages. This was one busy guy.

But it can't be a person, can it? It has to be a robot.

Today, two new registrations.

The email addresses look like this:

ipb5789*AT*bot-test.info
ipb4641*AT*bot-test.info

Same IP for both. 69.61.79.194

I checked my raw logs. No user-agent or details show up for this IP.

It shows up as:
200 40689 "-" "-"

I found several other registration attempts for this IP. Googling the IP revealed a preponderance of polish sites. I don't know what it means.

A whois shows a company in Georgia.