Over the past couple of days the number of new user registrations for this blog (unverified, I might add) has skyrocketed for no apparent reason. There has been no promotional campaign, no controversial new posts (in fact, no new posts in weeks).

Nothing.

I can find no common thread linking these people. Nor can I find any other kind of reason, such as me joining a new social network, forum or other online community.

That usually tends to lead to one conclusion: someone with more time on their hands than sense has decided to play games, either to make mischief or for some more nefarious agenda. There has been such a steady barrage of new registrations around the clock that it seems clear that a script is involved. I thought of possible causes like the Blogger High Backlinks plug-in, but I disabled that weeks ago.

So I guess it becomes a waiting game, to see what happens next.

I’ve tightened Captcha settings and reduced the verification time for new registrations to 2 days only, so I’ll watch and wait to see what happens next.

The other thought that comes to mind is the fact that I boot and ban more than 30-50 forum spammers a day from a forum I moderate that, since I began trashing these vandals and idiots, has seen Google and Yahoo! spidering the site multiple times every hour.

Who knows? Time will tell.

*** Cliché Alert! ***