Trick question on registration form to weed out spammers

#1

Hi, hoping someone else has thought of this. I would love to add a question to the registration form to stop spammers. I notice that a question I have already added there is answered by bots with a repeat of the text in the First Name field. So, if there was a way to automatically delete users who register where the answer in the First Name field matches the answer in the last question field, that would solve all my problems with spammy sign-ups. Does anyone have any tips on how to do that? (I am not much of a coder, so keep it simple.)

Thanks a bunch,
Kitka

#2

Why don’t use the supported “Recaptcha”?

#3

Hi, yes I am already using recaptcha but the spammy registrations seem to still get through…

Kitka

#4

Yeah, “Recaptcha” allows 10% wrong results, by design, because of used technology… Plus some sevices allow to manually solve them. Well, “heavy gun” is two factor authorization (and I have a plugin for that), but did you really need this? Can you just block spamming IPs in s2M’s settings or set another security filter like “punish for 1 hour after 3 unsuccessful attempts”? The automatically deleting will need some custom code.

#5

Hi Kitka.

Have you already tried anti-spam plugins to prevent spam registrations?

E.g.:


#6

Thanks for your thoughts. I will try one of those plugins first and see if that helps.

Kitka

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#7

I’ve found that multiple web application firewalls help too.

(and this is a technical solution that involves changing DNS records)

Free (or paid) Cloudflare (and WP plugin) => WP installation and free (or paid) Wordfence plugin.

Both Cloudflare and Wordfence are tracking spammers on their network of installed sites. They both want you to pay for faster recognition, and you totally should if you need it, but using both on the free plans can help lots.

The Internet is big and lots of magic happens outside of what s2 (or WP) can do on its own. Sometimes it’s best to stop spammers before they even get there.

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