Members deleted

[IBBoard]

I have just deleted at least thirty members from the database. This is because I believe they were spam accounts - all had been signed up for without having posted, all had a signature that contained nothing but a URL, all of the URL links were made of random letters, half of the URLs were in the form ve[insertsomethinghere].com and all of the names made little or no sense (even less than somepeople's user names).

If one of these was, somehow, a valid account and I'd deleted it, then I apologise and please sign up again. However, we do not accept links or accounts intended entirely for the promotion of other sites - especially not porn, medication/pharmacy sites of dubious repute, casinos or any of the other sources that regularly swamp the net with useless junk that no-one really wants.

[IBBoard]

Another sixteen members have just gone - nearly all poker/casino related. I'm putting some blocks in on a few of the usernames (ones blatantly using words like 'poker') and I'll see what else can be done to stop them - maybe a graphical image confirmation code.

[IBBoard]

Yay! We now seem to have a lack of signup-bot people filling up the members list. Obviously these graphical image things work well, still

[IBBoard]

OK, it's not a deletion, just an account disabling, but the account kimmwong has been disabled for posting two identical spam messages in two different forums.

[IBBoard]

I sent emails out the other day to all members who haven't been active in April and who have zero posts (i.e. the people who generally aren't actually around). That's currently a little over half of the member list, but two people have so far replied to say they want their account to remain active. All members who don't reply by some time before the end of the week will have their accounts deleted. Another warning will be emailed the day before I do the deleting.

[IBBoard]

Again, not a deletion, but Ninja of Khorne has been banned for signing up and making two posts, both of which contained nothing but a long list of expletives.

The 50%+ of our members who haven't been on the site since before April and who haven't ever posted will be deleted soon.

[edit] The mass purge of users has been done. We new have 118 users, having removed 128 dead accounts.

[IBBoard]

I'm going to sticky this as a tracker of the deletions I make, in case one of these almost-certainly-spam accounts turns out to be legitimate and someone wants to know what happened.

SonyaGold, proxy-checker and chatlanin have been deleted as almost-certain-spammers who try to either post spam links in the home page of their profile or make spammy posts. Others may follow when I check out email addresses.

[edit] Lusis Backwood and Zuban also appeared dubious due to the fact that they used the same domain as the other spammers. A quick search and another two spam accounts have been deleted - numerous registrations on a wide variety of sites in the past few days is not normal behaviour!

[IBBoard]

This deserves a separate post, since it isn't about spammers. The following old accounts have also been deleted since the owners have never returned in years and none of their posts still exist:

Jeph
Furton
war59312
Stef
Small Blue
simonh1
mike
Hotwire
mo_roodi
leedrinnan
Painter
Killerkris

If you are one of these members and do return, feel free to sign up again, but a good chunk of you are University people from the days when we used the forums as a central location for files.

[IBBoard]

prozac7674 has been deleted as a spam signup, and has made me suspicious of inbox.ru - it may become another email domain that will be banned.

[IBBoard]

prozac7674 has just been deleted again after they signed up again. inbox.ru email addresses will be banned shortly, although for comedy value their 'welcome' email was bounced by the mail.ru server because they've blacklisted the server we're on. Great irony for a domain that's the main source of email addresses for spam registrations on these forums!

[IBBoard]

The following members have been deleted after the latest irregular email announcement bounced/failed:

Adj_ds: "This account has been disabled or discontinued"
Asdrubael Vect: "Mailbox is inactive"
black templar: "unrouteable mail domain "bellbraeps.edu.au"
Elanor: "mailbox unavailable"
Lazzer: "Recipient Rejected: Account Inactive"
Mirridi: "Invalid Recipient"
Mr_Wong: invalid email address (ask@me.plz)
Shas'o Vior'la Ukos: "The recipient cannot be verified. Please check all recipients to verify they are valid."
Street: "This user doesn't have a talk21.com account"
Tea_Tree: invalid email address (gfh@fghfghgfh.fgh)
The Impailer: "This user doesn't have a talk21.com account"
Webm0nkey: unrouteable mail domain "gr00v.com"

[IBBoard]

Liza505 has been deleted. Their IP address was from a suspect block of IPs (a company called NetCatHost, known for a lot of blog spam) and domain from their email (jonasandliz.org) flashed up "NFL betting" in the title before redirecting to an error 404 page. Also, their name was Liza, but their email address was peter@jonasandliz.org, which is always suspicious.

[IBBoard]

After a few days and an eventual email timeout, grOOvstEIn has been deleted since the email address for the account is no longer available.

[IBBoard]

Following Liza505 with the email address from a domain of dubios content, I've checked a few more emails and deleted the following members:

peter1973 (email address domain redirected to a porn site)
kimmwong (for having been banned for spamming anyway)
ninja of khorne (for having been banned for posting two messages full of expletives)

[IBBoard]

Fiodora (from a Korean IP) and Diogen77 (from a Russian Moscow IP) have been deleted. Both users signed up with cashette.com emails that bounced with the message "User unknown in local recipient table". The emails were logintske@ and loginirm@, so I believe they're also potentially related. I think the use of the Cashette domain (a company that offers 'spam free emails' by making advertisers pay for delivery) is either an attempt to look legitimate or an act of irony.