Right, we've noticed a HUGE jump in our membership count in the last week or so, and picking through them it's 95% spammers and spam.

So, we're taking drastic action. We've banned several Indian ISP ranges, as well as a few from China, Singapore and a couple from the Phillipines. We've also banned a Canadian ISP (iWeb Technologies) and are on the verge of banning an American one, too -  Nobis, if anyone is interested.

Since banning the Indian ranges, posted spam has dropped off markedly - however, we've also seen this huge surge in the last few days of spammers registering, filling out their signatures but never posting; we have no idea how or if this is related.

We've also removed the signatures and blanked the profiles of anyone who has registered but never posted.

Our apologies, but none of the admin staff feel like picking through a couple of thousand new members and picking out just the crap - in total, 1788 signatures have been removed. Legitimate users are free to replace them.

For any of those spammers reading; You are wasting your time. You can make as many accounts as you like - if you never post then those links never get indexed by any search engine, as our member list is hidden and is set donotfollow, and we'll be purging your signatures from time to time.

This post was last modified: 03-25-2011 02:31 PM by ῦ.

irony.

ring, ring, ring (I reported already - as I am sure you all have as well) - I hope they can be deleted...

Working on it. These guys are all over the site, so it's taking some time.

You guys might need back-up.... I'm just being honest about the spam increases..... but keep at it.

They're gone. Registrations have been turned off while I track down the source and start writing snippy letters to ISPs.

Thanks to everybody for being so proactive about informing the staff about the spambots. I'm going to turn on registrations for a bit - if they start spamming again and I don't react within about ten minutes, feel free to use the Email button beside my avatar.

Fair enough