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Spam control


rkstevens

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I added to my site an additional registration question to help me detect spam registrations. Since my site is a fan site for a musical artist, I simply ask potential registrars what their favorite song is. It's simple, and easy to tell who is a valid registration and who isn't. Except.....
Whenever there is a time that the spammers are hitting hard (like right now) it is not easy to check this information. I have to pull up the validating users list, click on a name to view their profile, select the profile information tab, then scroll to see if it is valid. I then have to go back and either approve or delete/block/mark as spam. This takes a good bit of time for something that usually does not net me any new registrations.

What would be a nice addition to IP.Board is "registration question" where the board owner could enter a question to be answered on registration (and optionally stored in their profile). Then in the validating screen the user's answer could be listed on the same screen, and then the board owner could easily approve or ban accounts.
Or simply have a way to display certain profile fields in the validation screen information.
Of course I could easily do this using phpMyAdmin, but it would be better (and easier) if included in the product.

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If you were to configure Registration Question and Answer Challenges with a suitable question or questions about your artist, then the vast majority of spammers would be automatically rejected.



Agree, just say

what is this site about ?
with the answers

music
Music
MUSIC

and you should cover everything which will prevent a script anyway.
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If you were to configure Registration Question and Answer Challenges with a suitable question or questions about your artist, then the vast majority of spammers would be automatically rejected.



That said, ive just added a (pair of) forum-topic-specific challenge questions and it appears to have made no diffrence at all, or certainly as of this morning we had another 20 new members with the occupation of 'google' and random names/locations.


Daniel
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That said, ive just added a (pair of) forum-topic-specific challenge questions and it appears to have made no diffrence at all, or certainly as of this morning we had another 20 new members with the occupation of 'google' and random names/locations.




Daniel



You must be getting hit by humans then, there is no way a bot could guess that challenge question. I spent my life on UK waterways and I'd have to look that one up
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Bots CAN be coded to attack individual sites, and thus defeat your challenge questions. It is just uncommon for them to be programmed to attack individual sites in this manner - generally tools are built that can attack many similar sites (i.e. all IP.Board installations), without having logic to handle individual domains added.

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First rule's when your being flooded

Admin Validation = On
Check Inbox of the account you send mail from, if there's a bounce from a registration = mark as spam/purge/delete/banhammer
If questionable = stopforumspam.com
If you have an active license = spam service on (and make sure you adjust thresholds to meet your needs)

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