[3.3.x] Support Forum • Re: Cannot stop spammer from registration

You might have better luck with a shotgun approach. Ban the email address *vvb@gmail.com and all wildcards like it.
Next, if they're registering, the forum is recording their IP. Ban their IP networks, in such a way as they don't interfere with your regular members IPs or your Web host.

Banning by IP is pretty useless as they could simply spin up a VPN or proxy server and get a new IP. There are even services that will let you choose which country you appear to be from.

If by useless, you mean 99% effective, I'll agree with your definition. For our forum it has proven to be very effective. Scammers and trolls have been stopped in their tracks. Thus if it's been useless and VPNs trickery is so easy for them, then our forum must not be worth their effort. Granted, IP wildcard blocks are a crude method and has been a lot of work up front. But we've adapted with IP wildcard bans in the .htaccess file as well as up-front denys in Robots.txt. Anymore, adding IP bans are almost a rarity. On our host, I can see the traffic analytics reports and the dwindling amount of spammer traffic just see Forbidden 403.

Set set captcha Q&A questions that are easy enough for you to create and typical prospective members to get past, but difficult for intruders not familiar with obvious Q&A answers. Don't just say name the ocean west of Europe, have some fun with it, if the answer is say, Atlantic play tricks, have them type just the consonants or have them type the word backwards. Things like that. You'd be surprised by how quickly you can weed trolls out that way.

You'd be surprised how easily bots would be able to figure those combinations.

Maybe so, but not in our experience it hasn't. This too has been extremely affective. We've had a couple of the home-made questions that were too easy, but it's only been two or three, IIRC. We haven't had to change or make up new ones in better than a year. And we know people are getting through because our membership goes up almost daily, with few complaints.

Statistics: Posted by SQLnovice — Sun Jan 07, 2024 10:02 pm