What's with all the weird new memberships ??

[WaterCottage]

In the first two weeks of May there seems to be a flood of new memberships with weird names, and no info.

Maybe some computer generated spam? Except for the one with an ad in it, what is the point of the others?


Jay

[dpearson]

It appears to be Spammers. I am getting a flood of new registrations every Friday and Saturday during evening hours in China. I am slowly putting filters in place to eliminate Chinese forum users. Nothing agains the country, but 100% of Chinese registrants have not had a legitimate reason for joining the forum.

[Admin]

Well. It appears that we have a large number of Alcan Boat fans in China. When I looked at the forum this afternoon, we had 244 new registrations. This represents about 1500% growth in only a few days. Unfortunately, none of the new registrants had a legitimate reason to access the forum. I suspect their motives had more to do with financial gain and interference with our peaceful enjoyment of our boating related internet activity. I have been doing research into filtering out unwanted traffic and had started the process of blocking selecting IP ranges. With the recent onslought of forum registrations, I have started blocking larger ranges covering a substational amount of the planet. If you are unable to access the forum, it may be because I have been a little too aggressive in blocking IP addresses. I apologize in advance for this and hope you will contact me to resolve the issue. Of course, if you are blocked you will not be able to read this message so we might have a problem on our hands. If you happen to be traveling outside of North America and are using a local ISP, you may find you are unable to access the forum. I apologize for any inconvenience.

David

[Admin]

Well... with any luck I have significantly reduced the problem of spam users attempting register on the Forum. You will notice a new look and feel to the forum as I have upgraded the software to a more recent version that includes much better security features.

Now on to the job of a web-site update.

Thanks
David