Originally Posted by
Champlain Islander
It is 6:12 AM and listed below are the 34 members who are on line and what they are doing. I ask you IBOBI why are they here and what are they doing? Ordinarily at this time of day there are only 3 or 4 members up on the site. Something has changed and I am not confident that it is a good change. They are here for a reason and all we get is ...everything is good. I hope this situation ends but in the mean time I'll be signing off and staying away because I don't have the confidence that those people aren't here for a nefarious reason. They aren't selling anything, aren't posting to connect with other members, obviously looking at other profiles and private messaging.... so why are they here? One possibility I can think of puts my cyber security at risk. It has been fun but something isn't right here anymore.
I'm not sure what causes it, but I recall having the conversation with you when you were moderating about the tool that reports what part of the site people are on/what they're doing -- it is not accurate. None of these users has sent or received any PMs. Really, there is no boogeyman. Just a glitch. I'm not sure why the obsession with these new accounts, but they are literally just sitting there doing nothing. That's what spam farms do. They create accounts and by and large do nothing. Why? I don't know, and as long as they are not spamming our forums, it doesn't really matter. Those are not "people." They're just accounts created by spambots.
If you'll see above, I have a tech ticket in place that should cull a lot of the spambots' signatures -- even the non problematic ones. We'll have to wait for tech to get to it.
Again, thank you for your concern, but the "PMs" appears to be a nonissue.