http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=5105
Forum moderators have been battling spammers creating bogus accounts by the thousands using automated "bots". The only way moderators currently have to attack the problem is by a laborious process of searching for such accounts and selecting them for deletion. This has been working, although at the cost of considerable time to perform the operations; however, such accounts are currently being created at a rate of thousands per day making deletion of 50 at a time via the web interface a practical impossibility.
Our approach has been to delete all "Inactive" accounts more than 7 days old (these are being created at a rate of about 1 per minute) and "Active" accounts with no posts and either no logins, or with no logins in the last 30 days. The latter are the rapidly growing problem, and more than 40,000 accounts with zero posts created between 7 and 30 days ago currently exist. Account creation at this rate will likely bring the site down if the situation is not dealt with soon.
Proposed approach:
1. Implement some automated way of deleting accounts as described above. 2. Implement captcha or some other mechanism in the account creation process to foil the bots.
Phil