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Keeping site spammers out...

Started by diva, November 15, 2004, 06:54:33 AM

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diva

A friend of mine who is a professional musician has been targeted for a while by spammers who register, don't post but put their email or site as a jewellry sales, drug sales, porno site....no sooner do we delete them then more come..

We are sick of  constantly deleting...is it possible to develop a mod which modifies registration so that people must be approved by admin and if its not done within X days it will auto delete?

Im desperate for something as they are driving me (as one of his moderators) insane very slowly and painfully

Gandalf

also maybe make users write a CHARACTERS that figure in an image to avoid bots registration
Siemens-mobiles.org Visit it and you won't regret it :D

Grudge

You can already make it so that users have to be approved by an admin. It's in "Feature Settings and Options". Change the registration method to "approval".

It won't auto-delete them for you though, but you can delete a batch at once by just going to admin -> Registration Management and delete from there
I'm only a half geek really...

diva

#3
Im not sure if they are using a bot...how can you tell? Your idea DOES sound good though, a lot of sites use that when you sign up eg the free webspace sites

Hi Grudge....thats what I want to avoid...constantly deleting them grrr


Am I right in assuming there is no way around it? If you don't think its practical I will just have to keep deleting sigh....

Aeolis

I'm assuming you'd be checking more than every X days, in which case you'd be right there with the delete button handy, and not just checking every once in a while and letting the legit users get deleted...   hitting the check all button then deleting shouldn't be that much of a hassle to risk kicking legit users out too after x days.  Its not like you have to search through the whole list of members.

Either way, I'm guessing it wouldn't be a difficult mod, for the unactivated, check their registration compared to the current time, delete if over the x day limit.


ryanbsoftware

i'd bet they might be on a spammer blacklist, you can search goolge and an all ip's listed also set it to require at least email avalidation so they have to use a valid email address that they have access to to register. ;)

Grudge

The problem with auto-delete would be it would delete ALL members awaiting approval, even valid ones! If you have a quiet forum (Which I assume is the case considering you don't check reg management often), why not just disable registration completly, and put a message up saying "Email this address to register an account". If it's always people from the same IP range just ban their address in the admin menu...
I'm only a half geek really...

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