XF 1.3 Our First Official User Was a Spammer???

[TouchFish]

When I got to work today I noticed we had one user, I removed the .htaccess protection that we had to log in first before getting to the forum. How the heck is this crap possible?

I'm wondering if spammers are scanning this forum for new users, then scraping their sig or other stuff and then going after their forums?

I do have the various spam protection services enabled but didn't catch this person..

 

[Mike]

I'm wondering if spammers are scanning this forum for new users, then scraping their sig or other stuff and then going after their forums?

I would say that there are likely human spammers who follow URLs on this forum, yes.

I have identified spammers coming to this forum from clicking a branding link in an custom CAPTCHA XenForo add-on, so it stands to reason that those same users will look to follow links across all sorts of forums.

 

[TouchFish]

I would say that there are likely human spammers who follow URLs on this forum, yes.

I have identified spammers coming to this forum from clicking a branding link in an custom CAPTCHA XenForo add-on, so it stands to reason that those same users will look to follow links across all sorts of forums.

Thanks.. yea was just a bit shocked I was like WTF.. I wonder, with a link to my forums can I add something to the url and capture it.. like http://mysite.com/?loc=xenforo so then I would know that user came from their, I guess just a ref id..