question for moderators

genrex · 08-11-2012, 07:33 PM

I've noticed that Pelican has several "members" who registered on the exact same day in January, and they are often online but they have never posted anything.
Here is a screenshot of the user-info for one such "member", Boiplina -

As you can see, there are 7 "members" (in addition to Boiplina) who registered on the exact same day in January, and all of them have 900+ "recent visitors" to their user-info pages (it usually takes *years* to get that many views), but strangely none of these "people" have ever posted anything. No posts at all, even though they are often online. Who are these "people" and what are they doing here?

(I think we know who you are, Slodave.)

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dhoward · dhoward's Garage

Spiders?

Heel n Toe · 08-11-2012, 07:37 PM

LakeCleElum · 08-12-2012, 12:20 AM

Must be raining in Seattle?

genrex · 08-12-2012, 01:00 AM

I don't know.... it's 2:00 a.m., and it's dark out.

genrex · 08-12-2012, 02:41 AM

I did a google search on the word "boiplina" and guess what...

It's a word in a Russian type of language! I think all those guys in my first post (above) are Russian electrical engineers. Wow! But why the heck they read Pelican OT all the time is anyone's guess. Maybe they're learning the English language by reading the OT forum?

With that in mind, maybe we should try to behave from now on.

Twilight Zone theme music...

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john walker's workshop · 08-12-2012, 07:14 AM

it would be interesting to see what their private messages are about.

genrex · 08-12-2012, 08:52 AM

It would.

They probably think we're an interesting group to study. They live in a time zone on the other side of the planet, and they're always online in the middle of the night (Seattle time). Last night as usual all of them were online at the same time. They log in, they like to look at the OT forum, and they also look at other forums. It's very likely that they're sending PMs to each other, talking about us.

Pretty cool.

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Por_sha911 · Por_sha911's Garage

Terrorist Cell using Pelican for communication?

genrex · 12:40 PM

Wow....... ya know, that is a real possibility.

I don't know if the mods can view PMs, but I'm sure the big cheese can. I'll send him a PM right now, with a link to this thread. Maybe he can take a look at their PMs and figure out who they are. None of us want the Pelican website to be used for terrorist activities, that's for sure!

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PM sent to the big cheese and the mods.... thank you, Joe.

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black73 · 08-12-2012, 12:44 PM

Rick V · 08-12-2012, 02:38 PM

I am thinking someone needs a new tinfoil coby hat

genrex · 08-12-2012, 03:02 PM

I'm glad all is well. Thank you very much for checking it out, boss.

It's amazing the stuff you know! Sure is hard to run a good website...

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rwest · rwest's Garage

I've also been seeing and reporting! Posters who just randomly post a quote from another poster- they usually have about 7 or 8 posts to their name. I'm sure something is fishy and that is why I report them, anyone know what they're up to? The moderators have been removing them.

Best,
Rutager

genrex · 08-12-2012, 06:17 PM

Thank you for reporting those. The mods have asked us to report those.

Apparently many of those posts have invisible (grey color?) http addresses hidden in the post, and those http addresses are to be avoided. As Chico Marx would say to Groucho, "That's-a no good, boss."

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spuggy · 08-12-2012, 06:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by genrex

Thank you for reporting those. The mods have asked us to report those.

Apparently many of those posts have invisible (grey color?) http addresses hidden in the post, and those http addresses are to be avoided. As Chico Marx would say to Groucho, "That's-a no good, boss."

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I've also seen where these guys go back and edit out URL's from their original post - they're often still cached in the search results (e.g. "show other posts by member"), but when you go directly to the post in the forum, the URL isn't there - and the post shows a "last edited" time/date.

genrex · 08-12-2012, 07:15 PM

You're right! I've seen those, too... the editted ones and the uneditted ones.

It's a strange new phenomenon. They're making an effort to cover their tracks so they can avoid being reported and deleted.... and that indicates that there must be some purpose to what they're doing (beyond just being annoying).

It could be a new kind of coordinated attack on Pelican.... possibly another attack from the same jerks who did the denial-of-service attack on Pelican recently?

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