Where the fook do all those oddball user names that never post, come from?

dibble

They are basically attempts to spam the site. Advertisers create computer bots that trawl the internet and create user accounts on every message board they find. Once the account is active they flood it with adverts for 'cheap v1@gra' or other such stuff.

We have four barriers to this; firstly all new accounts have to manually read and type a series of letters and numbers from a picture. All very well but some of the bots can now read them as well. The next is that all accounts have to be manually activated by a moderator. This is where Dibbs and myself come in, I get an email whenever there is a new account. Next is a flood control which stops anyone making lots of posts in quick succession. You might have seen a message at some stage saying ' you cannot make another post so soon after your previous one'

Finally both Dibble and myself look at the latest new account and chack through the profile if it looks genunine. This is not foolproof, I have delete a couple of genuine ones along the way.

Hope that answers your question.

I noticed 'petrushka' was lnked to cheap car insurance in America.

So have we got 149 'genuine' members then?? Are we anywhere nearer a web page??

settle down he means ROBOTS
in nun's uniform

Yes and no.

Can you be a bit less specific?? Your accuracy and informativeness are becoming a little cloying......

Yes

Tit.