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.
\n
\nRegistration 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.<\/p>\n
My suspicion is that most of the signups are not, however, from people. I suspect robots.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 That’s gotta be a robot.<\/p>\n Plus I get lots of accounts from Russia for some reason. Lots of email addresses that end in 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Again, I’m sorry if I accidentally deleted your legitimate account. Please do sign up again. Thanks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2483"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2487,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483\/revisions\/2487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}nudesv<\/code>.<\/p>\n.ru<\/code>. 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.<\/p>\n