# Bogus userid's on the forum



## MacBuff (Aug 11, 2004)

You may have noticed that the number of forum members are increasing at a dramatic rate. We noticed this on one of our forum's and have changed the phpBB2 configuration so that each prospective member has to be authorised by the forum admin. I did tell Jae about the bogus uses on the TT forum a few days ago, but never received a reply and the numbers are still increasing.

A way to spot the bogus users is that the userid is normally composed of a name followed by a number (in true AOL convention), the email address on a lot of the ones that I have seen is the same name @hotmail.com. They usually have a website link, of which italiancharms seems show up quite a lot.

Finally, the posting count is usually 0

John


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## davidg (Sep 14, 2002)

I mailed Jae on this a few weeks ago ,no reply ,,, have you seen how many are Russian


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## KevinST (May 6, 2002)

Are they causing issues??? If not, why the concern?

The forum used to be set up so that anemail was sent out to authenticate the user, but the email server (at the time) had problems and I was manually authenticating about 5 users per day... hence the email validation was turned off.


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## MacBuff (Aug 11, 2004)

KevinST said:


> Are they causing issues??? If not, why the concern?
> 
> The forum used to be set up so that anemail was sent out to authenticate the user, but the email server (at the time) had problems and I was manually authenticating about 5 users per day... hence the email validation was turned off.


If you are happy to live with the ever increasing number of bogus users, then that is up to you. On the forum that I look after, we needed to cut out the crap, and I noticed that the same thing was happening here.

Look how many 
Spamma...
fotoman...
aphrodisiac...
golden-showers...
Johanni...

have registered recently to name but a few.

In the last month alone, there have been 200+ new forum members. I wonder how many of those are bogus, and how more there will be next month.....

Its your system, I'm not that bothered..

John


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