What happens to spammers user names?

[newbury]

I'm assuming that user names are not duplicated.
If someone spams and they get removed does the user name become usable again in the future?

 

[dan ny escarpment]

Newbury,

Not certain what you mean by usernames used by spammers. The spam senders cycle through forged ("spoofed") outbound email addresses routinely and more recently have been doing this for one single spam blast, from up to 100k different server addresses/compromised systems (google "Dridex" malware). That is so message failures go elsewhere, and so the message appears to be from an actual person. They also can/do reuse spoofed outbound "from" addresses whenever needed, but typically for very short periods. If you have ever seen a bunch of message failure notices for messages you never sent, that's likely what occurred.

They will also send spam to recipient addresses repeatedly over time, explaining the junk we all receive. Lists are bought, sold and obtained directly from hacked/compromised systems. Also, once an email address is publicly available on the web it's a certainty someone will send to it, and will forge/spoof it as a bogus return address on outbound spam.

Hope it helps,

Dan

 

[/pine]

Most message board software (like vBulletin that TBN employs) holds user names in a database and rejects any duplicates...it is usually up to the database administrator when/if the database gets purged etc...

These days..."it's a jungle out there"...spamming message boards like TBN is part of big business operation...one person can sit at a console and do nothing all day but enter CAPTCHA characters into fields that are supplied via a program of different algorithms for various server platforms...for multitudes of different (domain) message boards etc. at once...

Just for instance...there are plenty of PHP/MySQL programmers that do nothing but write/update code that manipulates data from above mentioned algorithms specifically for the (vBulletin) software that powers TBN and likewise with all the others...be they LINUX or Windows based platforms...

The best advise for the average MB user is to ignore or report intrusions...the worst thing a user can do is click on a link provided by a spammer...

on another (possibly disturbing) note...the same ilk of programmers (previously mentioned) also spend their time writing "cookies"...for instance if a user allows all cookies etc...one web site (domain) can learn what sites (domains) a user also has stored cookies from...and more...!

Like I said...'it's a jungle out there'....be safe, be prudent, be well....!

 

[aczlan]

I'm assuming that user names are not duplicated.
If someone spams and they get removed does the user name become usable again in the future?

Usernames are not duplicated. As far as I know, once a spammer is banned, their username (be it nkijnmk or dijunadwsi) is not available for re-use unless someone clears the list of banned users.

Aaron Z

 

[newbury]

Usernames are not duplicated. As far as I know, once a spammer is banned, their username (be it nkijnmk or dijunadwsi) is not available for re-use unless someone clears the list of banned users.

Aaron Z

That's what I thought. I've seen some good potential user names that are probably in the trash

 

[Muhammad]

Once we delete a user, the username can be used again. Most spammer usernames aren't very good (random letters and numbers are typically involved).