'I've been moderating one of the forums (forae) for a while now...'

sorry to be pedantic, Smyslov_Fan, but the proper plural of forum is fora( like memorandum>memoranda)

I don't think it is duplicate handles. There seems to be lots of 'junk robots' which automatically register and then try to leave spam messages. Every now and then I go through the list of members and delete everyone who has been a member for more than 30 days and hasn't written any messages, and this gets rid of most of them.
Unfortunately it is a pretty boring task but I will have a go at doing it tomorrow, and hopefully we can get back to 1000 members, or so!

I've been moderating one of the forums (forae) for a while now and have not noticed a big increase in spam there.  

However, I have noticed a lot of really general, "trolling," sorts of comments being made in the main openings sections of the Chess Pub recently.  This has been brought up by Markovich, but I wanted a separate topic because I've also noticed something else that the administration may want to monitor.

In the last month, the Chess Pub has grown from about 2300 to over 3500 identities.  I really don't think we have 1200 new people showing up here.  In the last few days, the Pub has grown about 10%, so something is either really great or really wrong here.

I'm concerned that the quality and therefore the existence of the site itself is at issue here.  

Administrators, is there any way to check into duplicate accounts and eliminate them?  This is a site devoted to publishing and analysis, there shouldn't be a need for more than one account here, even for titled players (including players who have published titles). 

I still believe that a moderator's job should be to eliminate only obscene and obnoxious spam, not to arbitrate what is a worthy topic.  However, the line has become much more blurry in the past week or so.  Have others noticed these problems and are as concerned as I am?