DHES

4 fall off

Dale

11 more slide away.

14 more users abducted by space aliens

Dale, if they are all recent new members you're being hit by spambots. It happens to all forums now. There's an outfit in Israel who promote clients via postings on forums all over the world. All automatic and they look like bona-fide members but their postings always contain links to the clients business. Only way to stop them is to prevent them joining by having a process that is either approved by you before they go live or has a step where the new member has to reproduce letters or words in a captcha image that is always different. Bots can't handle those, only humans can.

RollerBall,

New users do have to be approved by an administrator, we haven't had open registration enabled for a long time, I think many of these that Dale is removing are users (or bots) that registered and never posted and I've squashed several that registered, were approved and then posted spam. phpBB does present a CAPTCHA image for registration but they're not always foolproof.

My latest trick before allowing a new person to join the forum is to check out their usename on Google. If there are hundreds of hits and they are mosly forums then I smack the [Delete] key and their application to join just disappears.

Dale

6 more frightened off of the forum.

Dale

Another dozen booted

6 less