Posting based another user's report of problems.
http://boincstats.com/en/forum/10/10205

In checking some of the stats sites it looks like 60+ accounts and 8M+ credits went away during the June 1 stats dumps from here.

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Jeff,

Thanks for reporting this.

That's a little disconcerting. A few weeks ago we were having some problems with SPAM, so I ran the delete_spammers script. According to the comments at the top of that script only accounts with no hosts would be deleted. I'm wondering how a user with no hosts could rack up credit. I will investigate this further after I get home tonight.

In addition, I disabled web creation of user accounts. That seems to have stopped the SPAM problem, with the side effect that legitimate users can't create accounts either. I thought I read that users would still be able to create accounts via the BOINC manager. So I will look into that also tonight when I find time.

A few weeks ago we were having some problems with SPAM, so I ran the delete_spammers script.

Do you used some of the spam protection methods? Like RAC or credits > 1, CAPTCHA etc.
In order to get a better spam protection you also could use an invitation code.
Rebirther made this at SRBase and obviously he has no problems with spam.
The invite code is mentioned on the homepage itself - no usual spam bot can correlate that info with the account creation page.

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Life is Science, and Science rules. To the universe and beyond
Proud member of BOINC@Heidelberg
My BOINC-Stats

A few weeks ago we were having some problems with SPAM, so I ran the delete_spammers script.

Do you used some of the spam protection methods? Like RAC or credits > 1, CAPTCHA etc.
In order to get a better spam protection you also could use an invitation code.
Rebirther made this at SRBase and obviously he has no problems with spam.
The invite code is mentioned on the homepage itself - no usual spam bot can correlate that info with the account creation page.

I have done everything you suggested, except for invite codes. The spam problem is fixed now, so invite codes may not be necessary. The only issue now is a potential account creation problem. However, I myself was able to create a new account, so I still need to determine why the other user was not.

Is it possible the delete_spammers script saves the email addresses of the deleted accounts somewhere and uses them to block account creates?

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Is it possible the delete_spammers script saves the email addresses of the deleted accounts somewhere and uses them to block account creates?

No, I looked at the code and it does nothing like that.

I just wanted to follow up on this thread.

It looks like any user who deleted all of the hosts from their account may have inadvertently had their account deleted when the delete_spammers script was run. Hopefully that wasn't too many users.

I have already repaired one user's account. If you or someone you know has had their account deleted, let me know soon and I will correct it.

Thanks!