I have more data! Here are the top-level email domains used by people (?) registering on my blog recently:
Before December 28, everything was normal. It was mostly .com addresses with a smattering of oddball TLDs.
Starting at precisely 11:30 am on December 28, that changed. Normal sites now make up only a quarter of registrations. The rest are .top, .site, and a few other oddballs.
According to Wikipedia, .top domains "are often used for malware and phishing, and is included in the list of banned TLDs for some antimalware venders (i.e. Malwarebytes)."
Wikipedia doesn't mention anything noteworthy about the current reputation of .site other than the fact that it's owned by a company that's owned by a serial entrepreneur billionaire. However, every single .site address is of the form
name12345@lhfye.site
The numbers are random and there are five domains being used: lhfye, injis, nniks, scekd, and wgwpyi.
So this is obviously being done by bots or something similar. But why? And is there anything I can do about it?
you can take a look at this - https://wpforms.com/simple-tricks-to-eliminate-spam-user-registration/
while you're at it, a up/down vote and sorting option for post sure would be great! #brokenrecord
Have the suspicious accounts commented on of your posts?
My guess is that the registrations are illegitimate (not humans who want to reply to your posts). Ban and/or block similar registrations in the future if you can.
Of course they're illegitimate.
https://wpforms.com/simple-tricks-to-eliminate-spam-user-registration/
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-to-defeat-wordpress-spam-users-identify-delete-and-prevent-future-registrations#:~:text=The%20simplest%20way%20to%20delete,from%20the%20Bulk%20Actions%20dropdown.&text=Then%2C%20change%20the%20Number%20of,to%20display%20on%20each%20page.
Our robot overlords of the future have identified you as a key focal point.
That is all.
They're the New World AI come to prove the Old World Blogger was right about Our Robot Future.
Yep, new bots showed up. It's a pain.
Ostensibly, WordPress support should have guidelines and procedures/options available to you. Recaptcha perhaps?
Yep, the vultures have found you. Time to upgrade your comment system or be ready for a second full time job.
Check your old posts for comments. W/O some sort of mitigation, your old posts will be easily targeted w/ comments including spammy links.
He must have pissed off the Chinese. Who, by the way, are just wonderful people.
Even some of your commenters have weird names... 😉
Are you sure you didn’t get an Omicron graph mixed in there somewhere?
Just hit up WordPress for a filter to disallow comments from any such strange domain (regular folks don't register with those), they may or may not have it and I'd wait and see if any comments come through from them anyway (so would be cool to be able to query comments by domain registration), but this could definitely be used as a denial-of-service attack on your comments whenever they like.
Aside from spam, and as mentioned above, have that query check all new comments including older posts.
You're probably safe disallowing registrations from all but the original 5 TLDs. How you'd do that, I don't know. I only have a WordPress registration for purposes of this site.
Let me be the first Kevin!!!!
"Working just a few hours on the computer I intaked $7,980 my first week. With this opportunity I bought a Bughatti Veyron. For just a few hours work you can too. Just go to this website and sit back and watch the money roll in.
******* JbgYut.com and make account
(don't type the *******)
***************************************************************************************
How'd I do?
lol
😊😊😊
Presumably these new registered "users" can begin at any time flooding your blog with comments. There are various reasons to do this, from malicious to commercial. But the registrations are certainly bots, and as such can be easily defeated. Here's a link to a guide on how to stop spam registrations.
Before the junk comments begin, you might want to install Akismet, a very effective detector and blocker of spam comments.