Alright, well someone or some robot has been creating a ton of accounts on my new forum. If you notice there are near 200 users now and only about 10 posts. I was wondering however, are there any negative effects of all these registrants. The accounts haven't posted any spam, there are just a ton of empty accounts. I decided to turn on the Captcha so less accounts would be created, this has helped. However, I'm just wondering if there are any negative effect of these accounts being created?
Yes ... People visiting you site might notice this and think your community is dead ... Nobody wants to or either bothers to reply to any posts ...
Hmmm, you are right. Well the Captcha has stopped the spam accounts. Hopefully people will create Real accounts and actually post content.
On my forum I noticed that I had a bunch of new accounts that never posted. Looking into it I found that my email server took a dump causing no authorizations emails to go out... they ended up all being real members. I manually fixed each one and sent them all emails. Of the 30++ only 4 came back. Dunno if the same would apply to you, but it's something to look into.
I'm pretty sure they were all created by a Spam Bot because they all have unrecognizable names. Like I said, I just enabled the Captcha and no more users have registered.