On a board where I run phpBB, a recent member registered with the name "deixxervaisul". The profile says the member is in the United Kingdom. He left his occupation as "King of the Web" and the email address deixxervaisul@flashcubicle.com. The member didn't try to leave a website and never made a post. I left it alone.
Today, while looking at another phpBB board that I occasionally admin, I noticed a new user with the same odd name. The profile info is the same. The subject matter of the two board is completely different, so I have a hard time believing these are both real users.
A Google search on "deixxervaisul" pulls up 113,000 hits. I didn't go through them all, but the first 100 hits or so point to that username on more forums, and not just phpBB either. The poster must be using some automated tool, which means he probably circumvented my
basic bot prevention method.
I'm not sure what the motivation was to create these accounts, but I'm going to delete them from my boards. Maybe the poster is trying to get search engines to index the domain of that email address?
I'd encourage phpBB admins to make their memberlist and profiles unavailable to search engines, as I described in an
earlier post.
