I have a website that updates three times each week and allows user comments. For the past month someone (some thing?) has been creating a user name on the order of “bfcxgvhansdz” but never precisely the same twice and there is never actual comment.
What’s going on?
We get a lot of sign-ups here with names like that. Almost all of them are spammers.
A lot of them are what we call profile spammers. They sign up, put a link in their profile, and never post. They are relying on search engines picking up the link and rating it higher because it is linked to from multiple sources.
I always report the links to google. I also usually change their signature to something like “this profile has been identified as spam” so that other search engines will pick up the link as spam (hopefully - I have no idea if this actually works or not).
Check their profile. There’s a decent chance you’ll find a spam link there.
So are you leaving the spammy link in place on the profile pages? Why not delete it?
Thanks. I think you are right on. I’d missed that there was an email address tied to the username and in each case it is “algernol@…” That email is on a database of blacklisted spam and email addresses.
Scumbag(s)!
I delete them. Or mark them as spam to be specific. For some reason it doesn’t cause them to automatically be tagged as spam.
They are bots
Can I do anything to make them go away (or go directly into a spam file)?