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Features / Usability

Features / Usability


Bogus / Fake Signups / User Registrations

posts: 16 US

Hello, everyone —

So I set up my website and started to get a volley of signups. They are bogus. I'd go into details as to how they're bogus, but I'd prefer to not let spammers know what's cluing me in.

At any rate, I noticed a specific pattern, and added a user tracker to ask a question that I would expect a human being with mastery of the site's three primary languages (English, Esperanto or Spanish) to be able to answer.

I am still getting bogus signups, but this user tracker helps me sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were. I am using the CAPTCHA feature, but these signups are getting past it. It initially occurred to me that perhaps spammers were hiring large numbers of proto-hackers (I am imagining an army of aspiring 6- and 7-year olds who are hoping to break into the hacking biz) to go around finding sites and sign up bogus accounts in the hopes of having a place for their spammer employers to store their Viagra ads.

But there is a pattern in the way these signups are filling in my user tracker field that makes me think that there is a bot involved. So I am curious: can someone confirm for me that, in fact, the bots have a way to automatically do CAPTCHA character recognition?

I'm asking out of raw curiosity. The user tracker has solved the problem for me, although I still have to go in and manually delete all of the signups, which is tedious.

- Kat

posts: 16 US

Thank you for the link!

Is there a an easy way to randomly generate a simple math question (a different one every time) and have the passcode be the answer? I am thinking I could hard-code it in there, but it would be nice if it were a feature.

(FWIW, I added the standard, tiki 12.2 built-in version of a passcode - we'll see if that cuts off the signups.)

— Kat


posts: 92

I am having the same problem, and was actually writing the same request when Kat's popped up. How timely.

I tried following the instructions in the link Marc provided. I got stuck trying to apply the registration pretty tracker. I cannot seem to enable the "user_register_pretty_tracker" profile. I found a related thread, but there was no answer:
http://tiki.org/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?comments_parentId=50610

I have 12.1svn.

Thanks,

Greg


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