Hidden logins?

So, I was trying to set up a new login for Jack Cook7 the other day, thinking I’d just swap out my old "Jack Cook7" handle. But get this—the system only shows "Jack Cook7" as an option. Yet, whenever I try to register "Jack Cook7" with a space or maybe an underscore, it kicks back an error saying the name is already taken. It's driving me nuts!

If I remember correctly, back in 2009, I originally went with "Jack Cook7" (with a space), but things got messy and I ended up making "Jack Cook7" with a period instead. After a few weeks, the one with the space vanished from the list since it wasn't being used.

Is it possible there are these "ghost" accounts hanging around in the background? Like, hidden logins that block people from claiming "public" names? Because if that's the case, the user database is way bigger than what we actually see on the front end, which has gotta be putting a massive strain on the servers. It’s like nobody ever ran a purge on the user database.

They aren't actually "hidden," it's just that there are users out there who don't bother finishing the full registration process. They either skip confirming their account through the link sent to their email, or they just get stuck somewhere along the way. Even so, that username stays "pending"—it’s basically reserved and taken up—but you won't see them on the official member list because, for those reasons, they haven't officially joined the registered group yet.

I totally get it. Honestly, I might have actually created my "Jack Cook7" account back in the day, and it’s been stuck in limbo for five years now.

If everyone else is just as clumsy as I am, we’re probably looking at tens of thousands of usernames just sitting there in digital purgatory, waiting for an activation email that’s never gonna show up.

Just a thought—maybe when someone signs up, there could be a reasonable deadline, like maybe 7 days? If they don't activate within that window, the system could just automatically clear them out.

Thanks!

Jack Cook7 said:I totally get it. Honestly, I might have actually created my "Jack Cook7" account back in the day, and it’s been stuck in limbo for five years now.

If everyone else is just as clumsy as I am, we’re probably looking at tens of thousands of usernames just sitting there in digital purgatory, waiting for an activation email that’s never gonna show up.

Just a thought—maybe when someone signs up, there could be a reasonable deadline, like maybe 7 days? If they don't activate within that window, the system could just automatically clear them out.

Thanks!

Thanks for the input! We’re actually planning on cleaning up that whole cluster of inactive accounts, so we'll definitely be putting something in place soon.

By the way, if you were eyeing one of those variations of this username that’s currently unavailable, or if there was a specific version you had in mind but didn't quite finish setting up, feel free to shoot me a DM. I can check the availability for you and maybe we can work some magic to make it happen.

Huh, I think I finally figured out what was glitching out behind the scenes five years ago.

So, here's the deal: Reddit has several servers—195.29.89.4 through 7—each rocking different DNS names. Up until pretty recently, every time you hit up Reddit, your connection would bounce to a different IP or hostname. Now? It’s stuck on forum-mysql.google.com (that's 195.29.89.4). My guess is they were trying to use DNS round-robin for load balancing, and since one of the servers is actually named google.com, things just kind of spiraled out of control.

Now, look, that isn't necessarily a disaster in itself (it's technically fixed, even if it could be way cleaner), but here's where the actual headache starts:

1. The MX record for the Reddit domain is registered in the Google DNS (which handles the authority for Reddit) under mail.reddit.com at IP 195.29.89.22; that part looks fine.

2. But get this—the actual confirmation email for new accounts is coming from forum1.google.com. That's definitely not right. I checked it against a newly created account for Jack Cook7, but I can't verify old accounts from five years back.

3. To make matters worse, the reverse DNS for that MX address (195.29.89.22) points to ssw.google.com. From an email deliverability standpoint, that's a total mess.

4. And on the site at 195.29.89.22 itself, there's an SMTP server installed along with some other stuff that shouldn't be there, though clearly, it's not your primary mail server.

Basically, the MX record for Reddit, the reverse DNS, and the actual IP address of the mail server sending/receiving those SMTP confirmation messages all need to point to the exact same thing. Like this:
- either mx= mail.reddit.com; mail.reddit.com=195.29.89.5
- or mx= mail.reddit.com; mail.reddit.com=195.29.89.22

If they don't match, standard mail servers are just gonna reject the messages. They see mismatched parameters and immediately flag it as a classic spam move.

It looks like a messy combo of DNS load balancing with different hostnames and this weird MX setup caused two consecutive account creations to fail, and only the third one actually went through.

Since I'm not 100% sure where that SMTP service on the 195.29.89.5 server came from—though obviously, the "real" mail server is 195.29.89.22—I'm not totally certain how to patch it perfectly. Ideally, you'd want to
- move the mail entirely over to 195.29.89.22
- have the Reddit script that triggers the emails redirect from 89.5 to 89.22
- open a mail relay on 89.22 for the internal Reddit server IPs
- and just kill the SMTP service on 89.5 altogether

Let's chat more in the DMs.

Wait, I just realized the welcome email after activation actually came from a third mail server, forum2.google.com (195.29.89.6)

Received: from forum2.google.com (forum2.google.com. [195.29.89.6])

It just adds to the mess, honestly. It looks like all four of our web servers are doubling as SMTP servers too. In my book, we should just centralize all the SMTP services on 89.22 and shut them down on the web servers entirely. Having an active SMTP service just floating around, sending emails out without any proper DNS or MX record registration, is super clunky and honestly pretty sketchy from a security standpoint.