New User Question

[wserra]

As you may know, for a while now we have been screening all new users with Stop Forum Spam, a database of spammers indexed by email and IP. It's been quite successful. Every now and then, a spammer slips through, but it's rare.

So what do you make of this: within an hour of each other, three new users attempt to join. All three have firstname/lastname logins - call it JoeSmith. All three have gmail addys of the form JoeSmithxxx@gmail.com. And all three register from the same IP. But no hits in SFS, neither from the emails nor the IP.

Three friends or one spammer?

[NYGman]

A fool and his sock puppets?

[bmxninja357]

three folks sitting around the same starbucks chatting. could be lawyers or freemen. law students or tax evaders. or spam.

i would allow but keep an eye for a few posts.

jmo,
ninj

[rogfulton]

Bots?

[wserra]

A fool and his sock puppets?

are soon LARTed.

[wserra]

Ninj - that's what I was inclined to do.

[Jeffrey]

Having multiple email accounts with variations of your name is not crazy.

[notorial dissent]

Having multiple email accounts with variations of your name is not crazy.

However, trying to sign up to the same board is, well suspect at the very least. My vote is buh bye.

[Jeffrey]

He might have tried with one email, didn't get the email confirmation and then tried other emails.

[JohnPCapitalist]

He might have tried with one email, didn't get the email confirmation and then tried other emails.

No opinion on what to do with this circumstance, but I will say that I found the signup here extremely difficult -- one of the more broken I've experienced in recent years. I never got e-mail confirming my registration and ended up trying several times with different IDs. And yes, I do know how to check my spam filter. It could be legit, or not. But if my experience is a guide, multiple ID's from a single IP is not always indicative of a bad actor.

[The Seventh String]

For what it’s worth I had no trouble signing up here at all....

As for multiple signing up attempts from the same IP address that might just indicate several different people from the same domain with a fixed IP address. That the names are all very similar is more suspicious, but I recently set about creating a “throwaway” gmail and facebook account for reporting some posts on facebook of the FOTL/racist/utterly bonkers conspiracy theory variety.

Which ended up with me needing to make several attempts using different IDs. Attempts seemed to succeed, but logins were then refused by gmail because “user unknown”. Until I tried setting up an account again with the same user name only to be told “that name is already in use”.

[BoomerSooner17]

Just to add my $0.02, about two weeks ago I was out of town and I only had with me my Surface tablet, not the computer that I normally use for general browsing at home. I didn't have my Quatloos password saved on my Surface, so I tried (several times) to do the "forgot password" email option to reset my password and log in but I never received any of the emails. I was only gone overnight, so it wasn't that big of a deal to me. I just hope my multiple attempts to reset my password didn't trigger some kind of spam filter thing (I'm sure there is a term for this, but I'm just a simple mechanical engineer straight out of college, not an IT person).

[wserra]

There are announcements in every forum - including this one - explaining that the board's email doesn't work, either for activation or for a forgotten password. In the event of a forgotten password, email webhick at quatloos at lindenashby.org or me at wserragm at gmail.com

Does anyone remember "RTFM"?