The last few days I have noticed a number of people logged on DS who have names that are usually women's names. At first I thought, "Oh great, new members bringing a new perspective." But, days and days of allegedly female members I had never seen before started me wondering. Many times women try to hide their gender online for obvious reasons. Yet in the last few days, many have made themselves known here on DS.

The "newest member" listed at the bottom of the main page is "Lex", who joined 19 Jun 2024. Today (27 Sep 2024) I started looking at the joining date of these female-named members. I found:

25 Sep 2024
25 Sep 2024
27 Sep 2024
28 Sep 2024 (!!)

This looks fishy to me. There is a stereotype about roleplaying gamers, 'nerdy', 'lonely', 'young males'. I fear that some entity is attempting to make connections with such men for nefarious purposes.

Am I being paranoid? Has SR made me that way?

Moderators, please take note.

EDIT: and they seem to be cycling through names being logged in.

There are tons of bots registering all the time. Some use female names, some use male names, some use names that include advertisement, some use cryptic names.

Most do not seem to manage to get past validating, so they just sit there, inactive.

But it's quite a lot. In the past three months or so there were about 1,500.

Bye
Thanee