It's
far worse than we thought.
Take a look at the last several pages of new members, sorted by member ID. We are absolutely
infested with spam accounts. They don't even have to post... they can ply their devious trade simply by putting links in their signatures!
I have temporarily disabled new member registration while we discuss what to do. I went and ban-deleted the most recent two dozen accounts with links in their signatures, but that only accounted for two days. I have no idea how long they've been getting under the radar.
I suggest a multi-pronged approach to this new outbreak:
1) Run a database query that blanks all signatures for members with a postcount less than X (where X is to be determined, but probably not more than 5).
2) Run a database query that deletes all unactivated members, or members with 0 posts who haven't visited in X days (where X is, let's say, 30).
3) Manually review the username list for the past 30 days (from step 2) and delete all unactivated members, or members with 0 posts, who have ridiculous user info (e.g. a name like "whid0ds9w" and an email like "
[email protected]").