December 8, 2010

Administrative Note

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

I’ve been doing some work on the Wambooli blog behind the scenes. Basically, I’ve deleted about 300 user accounts. Right away: I apologize if I’ve deleted your account by mistake.

Registration is optional on this site. You don’t have to be a registered user to read this blog. Even so, lots of people sign up.

My suspicion is that most of the signups are not, however, from people. I suspect robots.

Not cute robots like Robby or Bender, but software robots. They scour the web for WordPress blogs and sign up so that, should a weakness be found, they would exploit it in the future.

What clued me into the robots were the names of some of the accounts. Lots of usernames with the word “porn” or “sexy” in it. One new “user” who signed up today had the name nudesv.

That’s gotta be a robot.

Plus I get lots of accounts from Russia for some reason. Lots of email addresses that end in .ru. That’s okay; I know that I sell books in Russia, but I don’t see why Russian users need to register here. None of them have ever commented.

And that’s really how I culled through the list. If I noticed that you’ve commented, I kept the account. If you had a Gravatar, I kept the account. Or if you had a real name on your account, or you had what appeared to me to be a legitimate email account and username on this site, I kept the account.

Now I may not have got everyone, so I apologize if I’ve zapped your account. It’s really easy to sign-up again, and I would encourage you to do so.

Some of you may have been around long enough to remember the time when I didn’t allow any new accounts. That was because of the deluge I got of robot and spam attacks. It was overwhelming. That stopped, so I opened up registration again.

For the future, I’m going to keep a tight lid on people who sign up. I will definitely continue to kill off questionably-named accounts. For the rest of them, I’ll let them go for a while, but will probably do another purge if the numbers grow.

Again, I’m sorry if I accidentally deleted your legitimate account. Please do sign up again. Thanks!

4 Comments

  1. When I was running my forums, I also noted the many bots that signed up and how many of the email addresses ended in .ru. Only one guy I know is from Russia that signed up and he wasn’t even using a .ru email address, just a Gmail one

    Comment by linuxlove — December 8, 2010 @ 6:05 am

  2. Every time I see a .ru address I wonder what’s up. Is someone running a bot just to see how many addresses they can populate? Seems like a colossal waste of time…

    Comment by admin — December 8, 2010 @ 8:23 am

  3. I am glad my account was not deleted. I would gladly add a “Gravatar” if I could figure out how. I have been to the “update profile” and I did not find anything about adding a picture.

    Comment by sean bernard — December 8, 2010 @ 7:27 pm

  4. Sean: http://www.wambooli.com/blog/?p=259

    Comment by admin — December 8, 2010 @ 8:51 pm

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