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Only allow registrations for certain email providers


Guest Dan F

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My admins are getting really angry about all the spambots that are joining our forums and they suggested that I limit registrations to only allow emails from hotmail, yahoo, and gmail. I know this currently isn't a feature but could something like this possibly be implemented before the 2.2 release? Or maybe there is a feature that I'm overlooking that will stop the spam bots from joining my forums.

If it isn't possible to get into 2.2, then you can move this to feature suggestions.

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Not everyone uses hotmail, yahoo, or gmail though. And sometimes some of the un-ruly members can come from aol. Doing this would be closing your site to a lot of potential membership.

The new security image in 2.2 should eliminate bots though.

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I would ban all AOL and AIM e-mail adresses because to many of those e-mails never get to my members and I always have to try and resend them and see of they get them. When doing that make sure you put in the Registration Terms & Rules box that u do accept registrations from those adresses also and put that in bold.

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And as I said before, spam bots are not going to be a problem after you upgrade to 2.2 because the security image has been updated. The only way for them to spam you is if they physically had people register on your site.

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I get so many peeps spamming my sites lately(last few months) that I have had to shorten the validation time and on some boards use both email/admin validation. I constantly add the spammers email from failed validations to my ban list as well as the wildcard but there are so many email providers this doesn't necessarrily stop the spammers from trying to register. (I even installed Fussia's mod for Anti-Spam(which actually has helped on one of my boards...adding it to others soon! :thumbsup: I would suggest his mod be considered for inclusion into IPB for a future release :cool: ) Getting back to topic.....it is a real pain to constantly add email,name, ip info to the ban filters since the spammers constantly try to register....havinbg more than one board this can become tedious! :( I am sure the new anti-spam image code restriction will work well in 2.2 but that only seems to cover posting and not registration...or am I missing something?

There should be something that restricts spammers from registering based on things they put in thier profile(which they always do so peeps can google them....like thier name or some number(89745)-if IPB could catch that and automatically add them to the ban list(ip, email, wildcard and member name) and then delete the validating account I would find this option most useful :thumbsup:

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And as I said before, spam bots are not going to be a problem after you upgrade to 2.2 because the security image has been updated. The only way for them to spam you is if they physically had people register on your site.


so someone makes a single page where they JUST have to type in the captcha code on multiple sites by hand...then the bot takes over. easier than going in and posting right? if you have open registration you just have to keep banning them <_<
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Ah, wildcards are working... I never thought og trying this. There are mainly two domains where these spambots come from so I can whipe them out. The other ones... well they get banned as normal -.-
I'm looking forward to the 2.2 images in the registration... :)

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And as I said before, spam bots are not going to be a problem after you upgrade to 2.2 because the security image has been updated. The only way for them to spam you is if they physically had people register on your site.


Umm, time to come back down to reality. Companies like Yahoo have invested millions of dollars in CAPTCHA research. They haven't been able to completely stop bots while keeping the image simple enough for humans to solve. Sorry, version 2.2 won't either. It'll depend on whether someone has an interest in developing an algorithm to break it.
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Some bots only know how so submit specific data through POST. One thing that I did back on another forum was make a CAPTCHA only page, then have the "Register" link go there. Once that is complete, you will get to go to the regular registration page (with the normal CAPTCHA) and register from there. It wasn't done very well, and the validation for the first CAPTCHA wasn't that good, but it stopped almost all of the spambots.

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Umm, time to come back down to reality. Companies like Yahoo have invested millions of dollars in CAPTCHA research. They haven't been able to completely stop bots while keeping the image simple enough for humans to solve. Sorry, version 2.2 won't either. It'll depend on whether someone has an interest in developing an algorithm to break it.



I beg to differ. The old captcha was very very easy. Bots go all over the net just to post on random boards. I know for 100% fact the new captcha works because I started getting it bad on my forum as well, and patching it solved the problem completly. I'm not saying technology will not advance for them to be able to do it in the distant feature, but as of now the new captcha stops them, and will for a long time.
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I beg to differ. The old captcha was very very easy. Bots go all over the net just to post on random boards. I know for 100% fact the new captcha works because I started getting it bad on my forum as well, and patching it solved the problem completly. I'm not saying technology will not advance for them to be able to do it in the distant feature, but as of now the new captcha stops them, and will for a long time.



Except that I have never before the installation of 2.2 on this forum seen spam here, and after it was installed ... bang! Porn spam. And the spammer had a registration date the same day and all. It is of course quite possible that the new image is too close to another (already beaten) CAPTCHA (I imagine with a ranking like IPS has in search engines, it attracts some of the big guns). And it's quite possible that the CAPTCHA isn't being beaten on your site because it's not what the crawler is expecting to read on an IPB installation, and therefore can't determine what it says.
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