A wave of spam hit the community site tonight that forced me to close new registrations. I tried reopening after cleaning up the new spam but the deluge began again so I've left it closed. We'll be trying to figure this out and come up with better spam-fighting techniques ASAP.

My personal opinion (not as a core dev) is that the community site should not host accounts that represent companies, but rather only individuals (and profile pics would ideally not be company/org logos). I believe if we dig back through users we'll find hundreds/thousands of accounts that were created as ads for companies/services and never used to interact with the community. I think these are a waste of resources and should be ruthlessly deleted.

Besides the blatant spammy profiles I see a lot of accounts that seem borderline spam with similar characteristics (weird profile pic, username unrelated to display name, no activity). I think it's dangerous to leave spammy accounts around because of the potential of them later being used to flood more spam. I'm almost tempted to say if user accounts do not post anything and don't login for N months, we just delete them.

An argument made for allowing company accounts is that they're popular on FB/G+, but I fail to see why Elgg should be responsible for hosting an ad for a payday loan company, e.g. It's just too difficult to tell between an obviously spam company and a company that legitimately has some ties to Elgg in some way.

What does the community want?