As usual, the spammers and hackers have ruined things for everyone.
For months now, among the hundreds of new user registration applications received each week, ten or fewer are from legitimate people who genuinely want to blog and comment about writing and publishing here. All the rest are from spammers and hackers, but we can’t know if a given application is fraudulent or from a legitimate prospective member until it has been physically inspected by a real human being.
While it’s nice to know Publetariat has become a big enough online fish to be seen as a worthy target for this level of spammer/hacker attention, we’d much prefer not to be showered with that type of praise. We simply don’t have the time or resources to waste on this nonsense.
Publetariat is entirely volunteer-staffed, and is offered as a free, public resource for writers, authors and publishers, indie and mainstream alike.
Since we don’t want to put our valued readership at risk by eliminating or streamlining the registration inspection/approval process, but we also can’t keep spending so much time and effort keeping the bad guys out, we regret to report that for the time being and foreseeable future, Publetariat will not be accepting any new user registrations.
We have also been forced to clean up our catalog of registered users, to try and eliminate nefarious user accounts from the past. All of the following accounts have been deleted:
1. Any account with a suspect email address
2. Any account with a suspect or spammy username (e.g., MyBestBargains)
3. Any account that duplicates a pre-existing username or email address