This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

Categories

Calendar

November 2004
S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  

Registrations

I’ve noticed over the past few days that I seem to have fake people registering here. Not that many yet. So far there are 8 registered users. 1 is me. 2 are people I know. 1 more is a person who might be real. Then four are from russian domains with random letters in their emails and names who appear never to have logged on, read any posts, or posted any comments. I am guessing these are not real. And some have website links in their profiles like people trying to increase google page count. Anyway… I’ve turned on the feature to require “activation” of new accounts, hopefully that will stop these fake people. (Of course, only 4 of them over the course of over a year isn’t THAT bad… but there are now as many of them as real people, so time for action!)

I’m still leaving comments wide open, but if I start getting any comment spamming (which is getting more prevelant) then I’ll start requireing registration for that too.

Anyway, I’m late for work. Gotta run!

Oh, and if you are one of those Russians, and you are actually real, let me know. :-)

11 comments to Registrations

  • Abulsme

    I said 4 in the last year, but all four were from the last week. (The one “maybe” was from July 2003.)

    A new one just tried to register a few minutes ago:

    Name: kotcarqizv
    Username: vivqfablob
    Email: ueukm32@mail.ru

    They haven’t done the “activate” step yet though. We’ll see if they do.

    Speaking of which, I haven’t actually TESTED registration activation yet. Would some real person out there try it?

    It doesn’t really DO anything for you yet, but maybe someday it will!

  • NM207

    I’m confused, are they trying to hack into something on the site, is that why you are trying to stop the “fake people” from viewing pages on abulsme.com???

  • Abulsme

    I don’t know for sure there reasons. Some of them (but not all) have put URLs in their profiles that point to websites. When Google scans my site, they will see these as additional links to that site, and it will rise higher on search rankings. That is one reason. But not all of them did that.

    Anyway, I have no problem with people I don’t know registering here, but I don’t want to clutter up the system with non-real automated registrations that aren’t really actual humans.

    Of course, since at the moment I don’t use the registration for anything at all, it doesn’t really matter. But if at some point I use it, lets say, to managae a mailing list of people who get notified when there are new posts, or any other thing, then it might matter.

    But even now, I just don’t want them cluttering things up or using my site to increase their page ranks.

  • Brandy

    What about when someone createds and entirely new post?

  • Abulsme

    You don’t get rights to create new posts just by registering. (Although perhaps that is one reason they are doing the fake registers, thinking they might… dunno.) I have to explictly give a registered member posting rights to let them make new posts. Otherwise, being a member doesn’t actually let you do anything new.

  • Brandy

    So signing up really just wastes a few minutes of our oh so valuable time?

  • Abulsme

    Yes. At the moment. Although if I start getting comment spam, I’ll require registration to leave comments. And I might start giving away massive prizes!

  • Abulsme

    Three more registered this morning. And this time apperantly they “activated”. Grr!

  • randatola

    Hey, Russians gotta make a living too.

  • Abulsme

    Oh yeah? Sez who?

  • Abulsme

    All of those registrations came from the same IP address. 66.199.238.21 And there were no hits from that IP address to anything on my site other than the registration page and the registration activation page. So I have now banned that IP address. That is the first IP I have shut down. We’ll see what they do now.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.