Slowing down Gmail spammers registering

[AshieF73]

Thankfully our platform gets very little spam these days, but the odd one creeps on and 99.9% of the time they are always @gmail users.  I have noticed in the last couple of weeks there are a lot of what I can only assume are Gmail spammers attempting to register on the forum as the image shows.    From what I can tell they don't seem to validate their account, just register them.  

We have recpatcha v2 enabled and a basic security question in place.  Is there anything else we can do to stop them registering at all?  If there were not so many genuine gmail users I could of course just block the @gmail domain. But as I can't do that I want to try and ensure we do all we can to stop them posting and ideally registering. 

Edited April 6, 2023 by AshieF73

[opentype]

You could try hCaptcha to slow them down, but if they don’t validate their account, I would just ignore them. They will be deleted automatically anyway and cannot do anything on the front end. 

The IP addresses and email addresses will constantly change (as is evident by this random use of dots), so trying to create a ban filter is almost impossible. 

[AshieF73]

Thank you, I will try that option too.   As you say I perhaps can't easily ban/stop, and if not validating then that's a partial success.  Thank you.

[Marc]

hCaptcha is certainly the way to go. You can also increase the sensitivity on that if needed