All Ye Who Register Here

[Mooselake]

Back when I modded a now defunct SEO forum we'd get hundreds of them some days, my morning routine involved removing the spam and banning the posters, by IP (usually the whole /24) if they were listed on stopforumspam dot com or in India, China, Pakistan, or the other usual places where we had very few members. Can't really go by email or user name very often, and phpbb did a good job of looking up IP addresses. We didn't go after them until they spammed, too many registrations in those heady days.

Some of them were entertaining, there was the Indian Love Guru who'd regularly spin up an ID and post about his love site in Hindi, and a regular spammer who described herself as a cute chinese girl. Most, though, were just the usual cr*p.

A lot of the spammers were from low wage countries, probably trying to make enough to get by and paid by the post. Still banned them, but thought of it as hate the behaviour, not the person.