Curious SPAM sign up today

[Gazhyde]

Not sure what to make of this.

I had a "member" sign up a moment ago, and it flagged as a spammer so went in to waiting approval. Doing my usual checks on it, I googled the username and found that they had been busy since last evening.

The results came back with 7 forums at the top of the list, and all of them running on XenForo. No other specific results on the search term. If I search with the name in quotes, then it brought up 4 pages of results. Didn't click on all the links, but everyone I did was a XF forum.

A few of the forums had already deleted the account as I got "This user's profile is not available." when clicking on the link.

Got me thinking, is this...

1. Just coincidence that they are all XF forums?
2. XenForo being much better at SEO and indexing them quicker than other forum software?

Just curious...

 

[Carlos]

They just want to bank on your SEO (and hurt your SEO in the process), which is why your xenForo is/was targeted. I wouldn't worry about this "coincidence" and un-approve or just ban them.

The other way to find out if they're a spammer or not is clicking the IP address when checking their profile. In "What'sMyIPAddress" they blacklist the spammers, so if it comes up that they are suspicious as spammers... slam that hammer.

To answer you question: Not really. It's not like the vB days when your board software is the first thing the search engines see. If your instance has a default "board description" is a typical XenForo installation ("Forums powered by XenForo" or something like that), then I could see why it's a "coincidence" to you, but otherwise it's possible that your site was targeted because it's high on google/search engines.

 

[Gazhyde]

They just want to bank on your SEO, which is why your xenForo is/was targeted. I wouldn't worry about this "coincidence" and un-approve or just ban them.

The other way to find out if they're a spammer or not is clicking the IP address when checking their profile. In "What'sMyIPAddress" they blacklist the spammers, so if it comes up that they are suspicious as spammers... slam that hammer.

I'm not in the least bit worried, as XenForo did it's job and stopped it in it's tracks. I've already run through the standard checks, although it's pretty obvious it was a spam account without doing them.

As yet this IP isn't on any blacklists, with whatismyipaddress showing it as coming through a "Network sharing device or proxy server" based in Florida

 

[Carlos]

In general, a lot of website owners that run xenForo don't think about editing the "board description" ("Forum software by XenForo" or something like that) area so their forums are targeted, but then again, search engines like google might still be grabbing the footer words that show "Forum software by XenForo™ ©2010-2014 XenForo Ltd."

 

[Teapot]

Bear in mind that unless you buy branding free, the license specifically states you cannot edit the "Forum software by XenForo™ ©2010-2014 XenForo Ltd." line in any way.

 

[xIsabel38]

Keep in mind that some IPs aren't spammers though. For whatever reason mine pops up as spam when I register to a XenForo site, @Whatley187 can confirm that. It seems to think I'm a spammer too.

 

[Carlos]

Keep in mind that some IPs aren't spammers though. For whatever reason mine pops up as spam when I register to a XenForo site, @Whatley187 can confirm that. It seems to think I'm a spammer too.

Well, that is unfortunate. However, the way that I check if the person is a spammer or not by seeing a suspicious link - I had seen that happen when the xenForo does it's automatic check and places the user into moderation mode where the administrator has to check the user before approving. And even if the spammer gets through, I find out quickly and ban it.

After a week or two, I delete the user.