Odd forum behavior

re-registration of pruned users and visiting russians

[tracylee]

I administer a forum supporting a company in the US and Canada using phpBB2 and I've had some odd behavior recently. I haven't gotten any answers on the phpBB forum yet, so I thought I'd try here to get another perspective.

1. I've been deleting users who have never posted and have not logged on in 90 days. Two users re-registered within hours. I checked my access log and one appeared as soon as they were deleted. Is there some software out there that a user can track subscriptions? I don't get enough new users to suspect mass registrations to bring my site down, but it seems like an odd coincidence that they haven't visited in 90 days but immediately re-register.

2. I've had users begin the registration process using e-mail addresses ending in @mail.ru and @freemail.ru. They don't complete the registration by responding to an e-mail sent automatically, so I don't know what's going on. Should I be concerned?

Any ideas?

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld tracylee,

With suspicious behaviour such as that I would ban them. It doesn't appear they are offering value to your forum and are exhibiting strange behaviour then you don't need them around. I also wouldn't think russian traffic would be of very much use to you given the focus of your forum.

Just my opinion but I would start banning, smells like a hack of some sort to me.

[rcjordan]

> smells like a hack of some sort to me.

Ditto. Nuke 'em. Smells like a forum-scraper setup. At one time, before Brett banned a bunch of them, "rcjordan" had duplicate posts in 4 or 5 Russian forums.

[rogerd]

That's pretty spooky, tracylee. You don't suppose there's something wrong with the visitor tracking feature, do you, and these people were frequent lurkers? That seems unlikely - a frequent lurker who was deleted might tend to write the board admin with a complaint rather than meekly re-registering. Were they getting e-mail notifications, perhaps? If the e-mails stopped coming, that could trigger either an automated or manual flag that the profile had changed or gone away.

RC, what's the point of a scam like the one you describe? Did your duplicate posts generate any business, or perhaps a Russian bride? ;)

[rcjordan]

>what's the point of a scam like the one you describe?

my hunch is that forum scrapers are generally in business for gathering "content" for the SEs. Usually, unlike WebmasterWorld, banners and ads are also injected in the dup.

>or perhaps a Russian bride?

Not even a good date.

[tracylee]

rogerd,
I've tried to keep e-mails from the board to an absolute minimum. There have been exactly two - one when I changed servers, and another warning that I'd start pruning users. I'd know if someone was sending e-mails manually to everyone but me as the admin, because I've also registered as a regular forum member with different profile elements for testing, etc.

I've verified that the visitor tracking is pretty accurate to a few hours in a number of ways, and these people had not visited since registering. Since I started this thread, I've had a third person re-register. Very slight difference to the name, but I still have few enough members that I can remember some of them.

It just seems like they must have some sort of software that scans subscriptions and notifies them of a change, or something.

Oh, and I did delete the Russian users and banned access to the site for those domains, so we'll see what happens there.

I really appreciate the feedback I'm getting from all of you.

[rogerd]

Tracylee, do you mean you haven't authorized automatic post notification that can be set by the user for, say, any post in a particular topic?

I guess there would be a variety of ways for a user to check registration status without a visit being logged. Undoubtedly, the visit tracker is based on a cookie. Have you seen any repeated calls for user profile pages, e.g., one could request the page yourforum.com/profile.php?user=ivanandropov and parse the response to check for continued registration? (I just made up the format of that URL, I'm not sure how phpBB displays user profiles.)

Too bad about the lack of brides/dates, RC. I would have guessed that prospective mates might have thought, "Oooh, look, Natalia... This RCJordan must be rich and important, he has many more posts than everyone else! Only a wealthy man with much idle time could write so many messages!" :)

[tracylee]

Hmmm, I forgot about post notification and private message e-mail notification. However, these people would have to log in and request that they be notified of replies for a topic. The topics that were active 90 days ago have long since gone by the wayside, so that wouldn't have suddenly stopped.

I'll have to spend more time perusing the logs for these users. The real job just sometimes gets in the way of my hobbies!

[rogerd]

Tracylee, the forum setup might even permit subscribing to an entire forum, in which case the e-mail would continue forever. I think the profile query is the more likely mechanism for an automated check, though.

Natalia: Yes, Katya, you are right! I will send RCJordan my photo and proposal of marriage immediately!