Recommendation to Turn Off Post Before Registering

[sadams101]

In the last few months I've noticed a sharp uptick in my spam reports from Comcast and other large email providers. When I view the spam reports, 90%+ of them contain this auto-response:

Quote

Thanks for your submission! Before your content can be seen by other members, we need to create an account for you.

Finish Submitting: Link removed.

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If you do not take any action, we will delete your email address and not contact you again. There is no need to unsubscribe.

The number of these reports has been steadily increasing over time, so the risk is that my site/domain/server will be blocked from sending email to many large providers like Comcast.

What is clearly happening here is that bots are trying to post, and are inserting either random email addresses from a spam list, or simply generating fake email addresses. 

They are being reported as spam by those who receive them because they are spam...these emails were not generated by the users who are reporting them as spam, they are created by bots who are simply using their emails in an automated attempt to spam using my forum.

Due to this I've turned off the Post Before Registering feature in the admin CP, and recommend that everyone else do the same, unless they want to be blocked from sending email to large email providers.

Edited August 24, 2020 by sadams101

[ibaker]

I had the same problem:

 

[modman]

Hi, bots are invading my site too.

They are able to post before registering, even if this option is completely disabled in the control panel.

Obviously this means that my inbox is full of error return emails.

My question is: Why if the option in ACP is disabled, can bots create "post before registering"?

I tell you how I have solved the problem so far ... I used the plugin and the external antiaspam service "Cleantalk".

For a few dollars they blocked all these weird bot requests.

Everything worked perfectly until a month ago when I upgraded to Ip.Board 4.5.x.

Here the problem arose because the CleanTalk plugin is not yet compatible with this version of Ip.Board

I wrote to cleantalk support and they told me that the plugin is ready and I am in contact with the Ip.Board staff to make it available in the marketplace, which is still not done and I wonder why ....

Thank you all
Regards

[bfarber]

As per my reply in your other identical post...

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If post before register is disabled, then guests should not be able to post without registering (unless you have enabled guest posting in the software). No plugin should be required for that.