In recent weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of user registrations on this blog. The users have typical spam characteristics like random-looking email addresses and names with “cheap” and “buy” and the name of some pharmaceutical brand in there.
But they never post anything. Not even try. So what’s the point?
5 Comments
I’ve noticed that too. Perhaps they’re biding their time until they unleash a barrage of spam posts. I tend to delete anything that doesn’t look like a real user and if the spammers do sneak through the first two posts needs to be moderated by my anyway before they’re give free reign. Perhaps they’re trying to exploit some as yet unknown vulnerability.
I think you’re probably right. A bit annoying though to have to delete users every day. Maybe the WP anti-spam tools will catch up and pick this sort of thing up soon.
Is WP easy to edit? If so couldn’t you stuff in another form field like ‘nickname’ with a type of text and put it in a hidden paragraph (display:none). Any registrations where that field is filled in can pretty much be discarded as they’re either bots or weirdos using links
links as in lynx the browser, natch…
@Richy - not a bad idea. WP is fairly easy to fiddle with and you can put interceptions in for user registrations, AFAIK. It maybe possible to register users via XML-RPC, though, and maybe this is being used in this case. Perhaps a pet project for the weekend
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