I operate a website at www.discoveryowners.com Many pages are restricted to members only by an asp-based login program (CMLogin).
The forum page is restricted to DOAI members. but I have been getting a rash of spambot-like new (non-DOAI) forum members. It is easy to spot them from the members list as they all use ICQ, use a strange name, and reference the same website for the home page and cool links.
Other than restricting people from joining, is there a way to stop this? How is this happening? Is anyone else having problems?
This was not too big a deal until one of these unwanted "members" posted some porn.
You can avoid that by configuring your forum so that an admin approve all new registrations. You can do that by turning Email Validation and Restrict Registration to On, in Admin Options -> Email Server Configuration.
This has been discussed many of times try using the search. There are alot of mods that will takr care of this issue there is a captcha mod and also you can make other fields like birthday required this will require some code changes you will be able to find some of those around here as well. Take a look and if you run into problems let us know someone will help for sure.
Requiring e-mail validation has kept their registrations from actually going through on my forums. I've only had one slip by and he was locked before any damage was done. You will have to periodically purge the pending members list...
Also, there are numerous threads out there on different ways to cut down on this. The simplest being to make an additional field required (like birth-date); this way the programs that are registering all these accounts will be missing a required field and will therefore be unable to successfully register (until this is taken into account..). A more complex solution would be to use a Gatekeeper question and/or a CAPTCHA - those have their own pluses and minuses...
Just make sure you research each option and make sure that the drawbacks (there are always drawbacks) are something you can live with.
Topic Locked
Posted - 19 February 2007 : 11:28:16
