Fake Members Viewing Profiles

[AnthonyBoscia]

At the moment, there is a large number of highly dubious registered members, all of whom share the same pattern and have no post count. Each one is viewing a real member profile at any given time. I thought you'd like to know.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I thought it looked sus

 

[leif erikson]

Banned a bunch of them. Thank you for letting us know.

 

[Thunderfall]

Thanks leif! I banned a few of them as well.

I also reached out to Xenforo support to see if there are some options we could enable to prevent this kind of suspicious spam accounts.

 

[Civinator]

At the moment, there is a large number of highly dubious registered members, all of whom share the same pattern and have no post count. Each one is viewing a real member profile at any given time. I thought you'd like to know.

What could be the sense behind such an operation ?

 

[leif erikson]

Data mining?

 

[The_J]

Might also be preparation for spam. Or mazbe even actual spam gone wrong, and something in our system prevented that it went further.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

They - whoever "they" are - have a variety of stunts they pull.

It used to be with vBulletin, we could check our profiles to see who the last 10 visitors were to our profiles. That's how a couple of them got caught - I noticed a new account with a suspicious post count, as in 0, visiting my profile. A brand-new stranger would have no reason to do that.

Ditto with the "like" system. I don't mind when legitimate members drop a "like" on an old post of mine, but if a brand new, zero-post count account does that, my spambot detector (similar to a BS detector) goes off and that account would appear to be one needing investigation.