... why's Google rating a thread?
It's just Skynet's version of Smash or Pass.
Seven guests, five of whom are registering simultaneously? I smell pork product...
ETA: I was right. Romanian spammers are busy today...
ETA2: And as soon as I ban the lot of them, new ones pop up. Whack-a-mole in action.
Okay, why's Google printing this thread? (Yes, "Who's Online" actually reports that.)
That's probably the equivalent of saving it. Google only has three copies of the Internet*, you wouldn't want them to have
incomplete copies, would you?
*Yes,
of course it's a conspiracy theory. But it's also true.
ONLY 3?
Geez. I would have thought they'd have gone for more redudency
I'm actually betting that the "printing" is effectively an accessibility check. Basically, "does this page do a proper print, or is it effectively munged so that you really can't make a printout".
Google checks a LOT of things anymore when indexing a site to determine the weight it's given in a search query. I'd be shocked, knowing now that it was printing, that printability WASN'T one of those things.
Nine guests, six of which are registering simultaneously. You betcha they're coming from IPs associated with known spammers, located all around the world... What, have we become some kind of challenge?
I don't think its so much that as the idiot botniks simply see a site they havent joined yet and keep trying no matter what.
Probably because we're in the first of three categories of forums:
1: Forums where there isn't an account for the spammer/hacker.
2: Forums where there's at least one active account for the spammer/hacker.
3: Forums where the spammer/hacker has a 100% complete ban for their efforts.
I'm sure that out of the three, #1 gets the most effort. Hell, even #3 probably gets some effort, in case there's an IP address they can find that hasn't yet been flagged, tagged and bagged by the forum admin.
ETA: Strike that, 13 guests now. Dammit.
And in this morning's installment, 3 guests went to 9 in a matter of about 30 seconds, most of which were known spammers. And a couple minutes later, after some IP banning, we still had 9 guests, with a new assortment of IPs associated with known spammers.
You know, I think we must have hit some kind of tipping point a couple days ago. That day with 9 guests seems to have been our highwater mark, and since then, it's never been more than four or so, and almost none of them known spammers.
Ten guests a few minutes ago. Amazingly, only two were known spammers.
And we're back up to regularly spotting 7 or more guests at a time again. As usual, some of them are known spammers who get their IPs banned. Others I spot in the process of registering... but then I get no corresponding registration approval request. I'm thinking our ... idiosyncratic security questions (plus the necessity to get admin approval) does a whole lot to keep the spammers out.
So many guests registering!
So few new accounts showing up on my control panel!
Sixteen guests? Four of which are registering as I look, and two of which are on the "no permissions" page.
Nineteen guests, half of which are on the "no permissions" page, most of which come from 54.36.148.* Stopforumspam.com doesn't recognize any of those IPs as spammers, but you know, I'm going to take a wild guess and say they are. Banning the entire lot of them now. Pro-tip for you guys: launching a Macross Missile Massacre of simulated users whose IPs only vary by the last triplet is a dead giveaway that they're all fakes.