A captcha might be your best bet for now. I know it's not ideal, but it's the best we got for now.

Hello loic,

We do face the same issues too but there's no workaround even with captcha. These days, companies are paying real human spammers to bypass all these captcha tools

However, captcha would definitely reduce spam registrations from your site by at least 90%

Using a random question made from the admin that uses real logic I believe is the best solution. If the questions are easy for folks in your niche but slightly harder for human spammers, I think that can cut out a bit more of the spammers. I know you guys will be busy for the next few major releases, but it's worth considering for the future. And yes I plan on making a voice for this once ES 1.3 is released (right now there are some issues with voices that discourages me from using it).

Nope, it won't! I have tested this with our site and they have find their ways around by hiring smarter people. We can't be putting up a captcha that can only be answered by a person with IT knowledge, then everyone would have issues registering

I agree with you mark
It is almost impossible to secure the process because they are manually registering...
Did you tried stopforumspam api ??

So the only way to fight on that is to check and try to identify them after registration

Can stackideas provide us some tools in backend for helping on that ?

- new registration Notification is already ok
- managing users is already ok
- ability to send re-confirmation email could be helpfull ??
- A way to know how long they have been connected or how many pages (spammer doesnt visit the site) they visit ??
- if they just came one time on the past month and only for registering... They could be suspect also ???
- other ideas ??


What do you think ?

Loic

My idea was to work with niches, not IT folks. So for example my mountaineering site could ask "What is the highest peak in the world" which most climbers would know.

As for more ideas, there could be moderation tools that do things like sending you a report (reports are already built into ES) if someone signs up with a specific set of IP addresses or email domains. Some folks use throw away email services for the sake of doing things they shouldn't be. For well known spammer domains you could have an auto banner that bans the profiles within 5-10 minutes of them being registered so that they think they are manually being banned. This of course would only be used sparingly to email domains that are 100% spammers.

I'm also in favor of a IP search where it not only displays their IP address, but all users who logged in with that IP address. This can help with spammers and people who cheat with voting. Here is a screen shot showing where it could be placed:



I know there are cases where family members from the same house use the same IP, but at least we as the admins can get an idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

Hello Josh,

I love that moderation idea on the front end. Could you pretty please post this into http://stackideas.com/voices/easysocial so that I won't miss this when we start our team discussions for EasySocial 1.4?

Loic,

- ability to send re-confirmation email could be helpfull ??

We already have this, no? Not sure if I get what you meant by re-confirmation email but there is a settings in the profile type for registration that requires the user to verify their account.

- A way to know how long they have been connected or how many pages (spammer doesnt visit the site) they visit ??

Hm, I don't think this is possible unless we write a system plugin that generates a session whenever a user visits any page of your site but this is not 100% fault proof because some ISP uses proxy and some of your users will definitely have issues registering because everytime they access your site, they will be on a different ip address.

- if they just came one time on the past month and only for registering... They could be suspect also ???

I don't think this is a good idea either as per the second response above.

Mark wrote:

Hello Josh,

I love that moderation idea on the front end. Could you pretty please post this into voices so that I won't miss this when we start our team discussions for EasySocial 1.4?

Planned for sure Mark. Unfortunately I've been having some issues with voices such as editing a post and such. It redirects me to the main voices page. Feel free to remove this test post considering that I cannot edit it or delete it. I also cannot view the popular voices once I view the new ones. I recall you mentioning some evaluations to voices once ES 1.3 is out.

Note that I removed your link from the quote and replaced it with the word "voices" so that EasyDiscuss wouldn't detect this post as spam (it wasn't allowing me to post). Might I suggest white listing the stackideas domain so that we can link to pages on this site easier.

Hello Josh And Mark

Josh
that is a usefull idea i'll vote for on voices

Mark
When i am talking about a "re-confirmation email", i mean a new one after registration process
Spammer are actually manually passing truth registration process including the confirmation email
So after registration, when we have identified someone suspicious that could be helpful to previously block them and send them a second confirmation email... this one could use a default text and could be personalised (including Josh tips for niches... a personal question)


to prevent spam i am currently using
stopforumspam in kunena forum (API ) and it's working great http://www.stopforumspam.com/
also SpambotCheck Plugin for joomla : http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/site-security/spam-protection/14027
does anybody use Antispam by CleanTalk Plugin ??

No plan to include those plugins in stackideas products ??


Loïc

Thanks for the heads up on this but unfortunately we do not have any plans for this yet at this point of time.