Spam usernames

Have a look at the birthdays and membershiplist...

Nate already knows. He's hoping to delete some of them soon....I hope we can implement a security code feature to prevent people from making these kinds of accounts.

And I thought there was really 720 registered users...

What's happening is someone out there has created a bot that automatically creates usernames. To stop this, I'm requiring visual confirmation from now on (to see what I mean just log out and then go to the register page).

Anyways, later tonight I'm gonna go ahead and delete all the illegitimate usernames. I would do it right now since it shouldn't take very long (ten minutes tops), but I'm going to my "job" as soon as I finish typing this.

Oh yeah, like a picture of a word and you have to type the word to verify you're not a bot, I've had to do that before. *recognition*

That's what I meant by security code feature. Couldn't think of the word. I knew what I meant in my mind.

Can you get a hack to limit the possible characters too? Or at least make people use letters? Those all number or all symbol usernames are annoying, although I doubt most people would want to use them anyways.

All the spam usernames will be deleted within 24 hours. The program that I have running now to delete them will not allow me to delete them before that. But, 24 hours isn't that long of a time.

After all is said and done, expect the username count to drop below the number that it was before the spamming; possibly to down around 300. This is because I am deleting all users who have never logged in.

A lot of the names, though, are really funny. I like Vote Catholic Papacy 2006, lol. It comes right after other ones that say Vote George Bush 2000, Vote Al Gore 1997, Vote Dick Cheney 2004 and so forth.

Those are pretty funny names...

And I too thought that we had so many members, but I couldn't believe it. I mean, gain about 300 members in a couple of days? It was scary...

All fixed

The member total is, as of right now, 360, which is below the level it was before the spamming. This is because I deleted all users who have never logged into their accounts. Most of those accounts were just people who were >13 and couldn't join without explicit parental permission (required by the COPPA act), although I think a few others weren't real either.

Ah, finally. I was getting kind of tired seeing all of those people who have never even posted on there. It was annoying.