I’ve had this in my head for a while but I just thought I’d mention it…  It’s the duff blog registrations syndrome.  Investigate and learn!

Here’s some from yesterday.  Check out these two registrations on my Crawling Chaos website for instance.

aclubic                                aclubic@yandex.ru

kurtizankacomuaxa    stessofcora@topmagic.org

Because of the (hard-learned) way I’ve set my blogs up, everyone at first registration is just a subscriber.  Anyone can comment but the plugins I use block them if they’re not “real”.  But I’m notified of happenings.

If one does a Google search on either the user names or email addresses of these “users”, you’ll end up with a very eclectic mix of websites that the users are also registered with.  Such wide interests!  You’ll also see that the date of registration is the same as the date in your own blog.  My, they are busy people!  And yes, they never ever make a posting…   What does it mean?

It means they are robots on the lookout for open sites.  If you visit the sites, invariably they are full of porn/casino/gibberish comment spam mixed in with genuine commentary and postings.  Usually, they are bulletin board setups, but not always.  Some posts are unreadable text so are obviously code or pictures trying to load and run.

The solution is better security on everyone’s sites.  Lock them down.  Genuine users can still operate.  There are a swathe of solutions on the WordPress platform that extend to other platforms.  It’s just a question of implementation and vigilance.

Because of the lack of vigilance, there are loads of quite nice sites devoted to horses and vegans (say) which are being defaced by porn/casino/gibberish postings.  It makes them look like complete idiots so that their site content cannot be relied upon.

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