Spammers Ahoy! (IMPORTANT INFO ON USER REGISTRATION)

One thing I didn't consider when making the switch from CPG-Nuke to Drupal is that there are a lot more spambots out there for Drupal.  They hit the site pretty much as soon as it went up, and have been creating new accounts at a rate of about 2-3 per hour.  Until I get some anti-spam gear installed, this means two things:

  1. All new user registrations will require manual approval by me.
  2. It's possible that I'll delete legitimate signups that look like they might be spammers.  Read on to learn how to avoid this.

The spambots are surprisingly sophisticated.  Some have been set up to fill in data for fields like location, occupation, and interests.  This actually works against them.  Nobody signs up to bodyinflation.org and lists "museums and art" as interests.

If you're a new user signing up, make sure that your profile doesn't look like something that could be machine generated.  If you have an inflation-related username, or something inflation-related in the "interests" field, that's probably the best way.  If you leave the profile blank and have a nondescript username, then I'm likely to delete the account.

Note: This only applies to pople registering for new accounts, and is only temporary until I can get the bots under control.

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