Are these members spammers?

Hi to All,

I have been getting so many of these type of new member sign on's. I didn't think that they were for real, so I started to delete them as they sign on to my website. Here below are just a few of them.

cJessicaPughs,  nBrittDrakel,  dMathewSkinnera,  aThaddeusHahnr,   qTerrenceWadex , nSueCannonm,  kEthanKnoxr

What is the purpose of the lower case letter in front on their names? Has anyone else been invaded with these type of nicknames? and what having you been doing about that issue?

Thanks

the lowercase letter prefixed to the username is indication of a robot and auto-populated list of names. where a random letter generally lowercase, would be prefixed to a username, that is derived from an existing list of usernames. 

so if it were my site, then yes, i would consider them invalid usernames. correlate the names to the email addresses 1+1=2

Thank You DosDaw, 

I thought they were not invalid user names. How does one take care of a problem like this. Are they harmful to my website? I just been deleting them and they just keep coming back. Right now I keep getting the same one back over and over again. I check on their IP address and it's seems to be the same ones.

Try this,

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/China-is-invading-help-me-with-form-field-validation.htm

 I'm was getting hammered by the mentioned names above but since they are all hotmail accounts, using the email ban for me is not an option,  you simply add a "question" to the join form.

the most useful topic here to stop all the other types of spammers, read this

http://www.boonex.com/forums/?action=goto&my_threads=1#topic/spam-spam-spam-spam-IDEA-.htm

Are you seeing posting activity from these accounts?

Is it possible on your site to drop links into comments, profiles, blog posts, articles etc?

When your  members are using  a text input box can they add HTML, if so can they add iframes and/or javascript?

In general, a comment with a live link in it will be spam. A profile with a live link almost certainly so as well.

If users can add iframes or javascript through text editors in your input boxes then they can add code to do all sorts of bad stuff so you need to remove text editors or the ability to use iframes or javascript.

After we went through a process of catching this stuff the amount of spam submitted dropped right off and, frankly, if somebody makes a profile with a dead link in it I am not going to lose too much sleep, the traffic from pointless signups might help my Alexa ranking a little. ;)

Looking into one site of mine currently under attack by these email names..

the site is located in Sweden, 200 sign ups today alone..

I'm not too sure what's been happening to my site. When I started to delete some of these fake members, I lost half of my members. Today there was a new member / bot that I deleted and suddenly, I was no longer in my site. I tried to log back in and no account existed. I logged in under my wife's account only to find out that my profile was gone. What's with that? This wasn't the first time this has happen. It happen one other time and I had the site restored back. I was able to go into my cpanel and set myself up again. I talked with my hosting provider and he mention that there may be a security issue here? I've been getting spam so many times, I am about ready to get rid of my site. I work too long and hard to get it working the way I felt that it was going to be a good site. Right now I set the membership up by invite only. I hate having to do that, but until I can get these problems resolved, It leaves me with no other option.

 just curious here, what version are you using? because 7.0.8 supposedly fixed the admin suicide button? 

most likely, what i would venture to say, though wasnt there to confirm nor deny this, what could have possibly happened is that inadvertently more than one username was selected, and when you hit delete, it wiped out your username?

 i have personally not witnessed this self-destruction mode, though i have read about it plenty in here. 

Hi DosDawg,

I'm using 7.0.4

I thought about the idea that I may have had more than one member selected for deletion, but I am 99% sure that wasn't  what happen. Just before I lost my members the first time around, I have received an email stating that there was a Database Error. The ticket for that is still unassigned by my hosting provider to check into what may have cause the problem. But, and I say, but because it was just a few minutes later that I was in my site and I deleted another member and poof! I was out of the site once again. I'm sure that is what happen today. I thought about upgrading to 7.0.8, but I am not too sure if I can do something like that?