It has come to my attention (Thanks, William and Pastor Johnnie Sloan!) that a number of spambots took advantage of our lenient forum registration mechanisms to spam other blogs and forums. To this end, I’d like to personally apologize for the inconvenience caused. We are also trying to curb spam on our own blog and board, but this new form caught us off guard mainly due to its implementation.
Spambots were registering zero-post user accounts and filling the About-Me profile information with ads for the usual cocktails of worthless medications. We’ve done a mass deletion of all zero-post accounts made after the 20th of May and temporarily disabled the ability for a member with less than 100 posts to edit his/her profile. As a result, the spam links associated were typically in this format:
http://www.aeroxp.org/board/index.php?showuser=insert_number_here
We expect to return back to normal operating conditions soon.
Again, my sincerest thanks to William and Pastor Johnnie Sloan for tipping me off, and to the Akismet crew for guidance on the matter.
For those looking for IPs and emails to block, I can’t give block-worthy IPs as the automated nature of the spam meant that new IPs were used for each account. However, one domain suffixed to the bulk of our spam was “@top-medz.com”. If you operate your own forums and have recently fallen victim to spammers using your board to spam others, please check for this domain and any others and pass it to the guys at Akismet.
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