D'oh

Don't you hate it when you start a story and then get so caught up in the details you forget what you're original point was? Well okay, that probably only happens to me (maybe a few others).

Anyway I've been getting a lot of new account requests for the ASGR Forums lately. There was a spate of them awhile ago when one of the Blue Planet fans started a forum based game and there have been a few since as people wander by to watch the game as it were. Two weeks ago I started getting requests named

online poker
texas holdem
empire poker
texas holdem poker

Now I could see these names if there was a poker section and people talked about playing but no thanks. These have to be spammers. I had one account quite awhile ago I inadvertently approved and they spammed *every* section of the boards. It took me about two hours to clean up afterwards. So I filed these requests away and have been getting some more questionable ones;

cheap celebrex
free online poker

But this morning I got about five or six with names less controversial (or at least less obvious);

Rebecca52
bell10
engine76
bone87
spoon58
casino cruise line sterli

Well okay the last one is pretty obvious. But the others maybe not. However they all have 2 digit numbers in them, that sounds like a script someone wrote. But I've been watching for spam and haven't seen any. Hmm, I wonder if it's bots harvesting email addresses.

I think I'll go turn all of these off.

...

Well it turns out they were probably all poker sites (thus spam) since the website listed in each of them was the same and it was some sort of casino or poker site (at least those words were in the site URL). Plus all of these that I didn't approve actually had filled out the form to get an account so I went back through and deleted anything that looked suspicious (and when I examined them before deleting they all had gambling sites as their home site).

So it's a new form of spam. Great!