Suspicious username registering - spammers?

[Meza]

I've spotted a series of usernames registering on my forums that follow a similar pattern, and they all have email addresses at the domain emailaccount.com
the usernames look like the following:
! ! 1gagarin
! ! 2babka
! ! b0nd @ @
! ! roger ! !
! @rtist
! eprst !

Any ideas what this could be? I've banned them all straight away (have 'moderate new users' ON)
Wondered if it was just someone pissing about or if it was an automated spamming script attacking us or something?

[Xenon]

These users try to get on top of your memberlists, to make cheap advertising on your site...

I suggest to disallow such usernames from the start on.

On vb.org such usernames are blocked

[Meza]

Thanks for the heads up - I've checked and every one of them had a link to a porn site in their profile, very clever!

How do I stop 'such' usernames from registering?

[Xenon]

it's a little code hack.

the easy way is something like that in the username check section of register.php:

PHP Code:

    // vb.org check for a valid username (has to start with 0-9 or a-z or A-Z
    if (!(($_POST['username']{0} >= '0' AND $_POST['username']{0} <= '9')
        OR ($_POST['username']{0} >= 'a' AND $_POST['username']{0} <= 'z')
        OR ($_POST['username']{0} >= 'A' AND $_POST['username']{0} <= 'Z')))
    {
        $errors[20] = "Invalid Username";
    } 


[Meza]

genius! is that VB2 or VB3 code? I'm a 2'er

[Xenon]

that's vb3, bt it shouldn't be hard to transfere that to vb2 as well

[Meza]

I changed it to:

PHP Code:

    if (!(($username{0} >= '0' AND $username{0} <= '9') 
        OR ($username{0} >= 'a' AND $username{0} <= 'z') 
        OR ($username{0} >= 'A' AND $username{0} <= 'Z'))) 
    { 
        eval("standarderror(\"".gettemplate("error_invalidusername")."\");"); 
    } 


and it seems to work a treat
thank you

[genmud]

I was getting the same problems... I didn't really care that they were registering because they weren't spamming the forums, but It did kind of look bad because my forum is really tiny that there were like 62 members and 250 posts... lol

anywho... the registrants e-mails were all coming from a site called fromru.com or something. I just added that to my ban list :P

[filburt1]

On my board, I just blocked usernames with exclaimation marks and such. I never had a problem with it before, but to be safe...