Albeit unrelated to the earlier one: there’s been a sudden YUUUGE influx of bogus attempts at user-registrations, God only knows why. I am about to begin the process of clearing the mess o’ spammage out by denying most if not all of said requests, a process which, while by no means arduous, nonetheless requires no inconsiderable amount of time and hassle to get ‘er done. Just a necessary if annoying part of blog-maintenance nowadays, that’s all.
So anyhoo, if you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to be caught up as collateral damage in the imminent sweep, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.
Update! Y’know, it occurs to me that I should maybe put up some kind of permanent notice restating the above, more or less. Maybe append it to the CF Comments Policy, something like that. We’ll see what I can figger out along those lines, whilst I’m throwing spam-registrants out on their ear, updating plugins, and such-like.
Updated update! Jeez O Pete: no sooner do I finish culling the spam-bots than four more of the lousy bastards pop up in the “New User Approve” plugin’s interface. As the proctologist famously asked of his nurse, is there no end to these assholes?
No. Unfortunately there is no end to ’em.
Annnnd ANOTHER just popped up. One of the tells with these things is the fish-smelling email addresses, in the last several cases from a putative ISP called “ait-light.com.” Another is the usernames themselves: some name or other, typically misspelled, followed by a long string of random numbers and/or letters, the name given not even close to matching the requested username. Still another is how these email addresses all come flooding in right on the heels of each other, even the gmail/hotmail/yahoo ones. Yeah, sorry, no.
What’s always puzzled me about it is just what the spammers are hoping to accomplish with these stupid onslaughts. So they DO fool some poor blogger and get registered; THEN what? What the hell’s the point?
It’s not for nothing. You’ve been ID’d as someone that influences others against totalitarian government, as someone who will speak the truth. Therefore they are trying to tie you up, to stop your speech, and if that doesn’t work they’ll use the registration to spam the joint.
Were it me, I’d just turn off the ability to register for a few days without, as you already stated, a personal email.
I notice at other sites that the sockpuppets are being set up for the election.
For example, suddenly 7 or 8 new “people” show up advocating the same thing at the same time. They even begin to use the same language. Then they start use the same odd words.
Like how Journolist works, they all use the same phrase or epithet in unison.
In fact, it’s one person creating multiple accounts under different handles to try to Astro turf the support for a particular position.
Imagine if 7 or 8 accounts all jumped on a thread with MarkMatis all calling everything bad the fault of the Joos. One might suspect it’s all Mark under pseudonyms.