It is as dimalifragis says, human, and there has been a total onslaught of them this past week, I have noticed them on here too.
You need proper spammer protection that also calls to Stop Forum Spam to take care of it and also help fight them by reporting them. This is one of the few WP plugins that operate with SFS: https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/
Akismet, Cleantalk, Captcha etc are not very proactive protection systems which is what forum platforms require.
Still those accounts are NEVER verified and do no harm in any way.
You can filter the members by "inactive" within wpForo and delete them from time to time.
And YES this week it was a storm of them for some reason.
Still those accounts are NEVER verified and do no harm in any way.
Actually not true at all. Yes some don't verify immediately but more than enough do and they mess up your SEO reputation if you do not monitor closely. I watched one in action last week on a honeypot site, spammer filled their profile with spam of a XXX nature, spammer obviously loaded their profile url into some backlinks system and within about 2 hours hundreds hits started coming in to that profile even though profiles are blocked from public view. At the 4 hour mark after they registered the profile was deleted, even today there is traffic coming in to try access that profile. On the same site one of the spammers did not immediately verify but did do a password reset 8 days later and proceeded to fill their profile with spam.
If you look at your server mail logs you will note that about 99% of the spam registration conformation emails are actually delivered.
Be careful, be proactive.
@verek It depends on the wave. This recent wave, none have verified their accounts in 24hrs. I never leave unverified accounts more than 24 hours, since then i can't manage them.
