Hi:
I see I am not the only one that has been plagued by sign ups to our forum from Russia.
Most people can't really make since of why these people sign up and never use the account.
So I will shed some light on the subject.
First of all,if you have your forum set up to send them an email verification, their main objective has been a major failure and they will move on.
Here's why they do it. They are bottom suckers they are looking for forums that post the users email addresses. When they get 5,000 or more they sell them mainly to Oriental spammers selling electronics.
So some sites have instant sign up with out email verification, so they get right in, once they see that the admin doesn't allow a user email address to be shown, they move on.
So when you have email verification they have no way of knowing you do verification, so when the email is sent out to verify the user, it is going to either a bogus email address or a junk mail account such as hotmail.com or some other junk mail account.
So this is why you get a lot of users who sign up and never use the account.
Common users from Russia have an ip that starts with 91 another key is Pinkbox.com, or Greybox.com It is believed that these domains are owned and operated by Hong Kong spammers. They provide the sign up domains for their email accounts.
What I do is, I look at the never used accounts. Then I add them to the ban user list.
Keep in mind that the Russian economy is hurting really bad. Out side of Vodka they have nothing.
Outside of the sign ups,being a pain in the a$$, there's nothing malicious outside of trying to get email addresses.
So make sure you do not display a members email address.
Crow.
[edited by: tedster at 4:56 pm (utc) on Sep 28, 2010]
