So I’m up to the point of getting about 40 spam registrations a day now. There are a lot of sites out there far bigger than my humble corner of the ‘net. What do you folks do about it? I’d love some pointers. Here’s what I’ve tried so far.
First up, I run VoodooPress through Cloudflare. They have some security settings that are supposed to block bad IPs. I’m not even sure if that is just for comments, or what. I believe it is supposed to block bad IPs in general from getting to my site.
Next up is the plugins. For Spam comments I combine Akismet and Cookies for Comments. These plugins do a great job of stopping just about every spam comment. But I can seem to nail anything down for registration.
I’ve hopped around to a variety of registration plugins. Most notably Bad Behavior and SABRE. The problem is, as soon as I activate those plugins, I get a considerable amount of notices from users that they can’t get to my site, and especially use the forum. Like about half of my legitimate folks get blocked.
Anybody got any tricks for me that’ll curb the spam registration without blocking my legitimate users? I’m not interested in any kind of captcha, I have strong feelings against there usage. Thanks peeps!
I won’t say I get zero spam registrations on WPCandy — I still do a little bit of manual maintenance on it — but I don’t have anything near those numbers. What I do (which was done mostly coincidentally, not specifically to avoid spam) is keep registration on the blog turned off. Then I use a Gravity Form with the User Registration add-on to handle user registrations.
If I had to guess, this keeps a good deal of the spam signups away because the bots are looking to register via default URLs. Since mine won’t work it probably stops a bunch of them in their tracks.
Hope that helps you out. Spam sucks.
It sure does! I have gravity forms with a dev license for another site. Hadn’t even thought about that route! Thanks for the tip!
Yup, you get to be my hero for the day! Almost 24 hours, zero spam registrations! That is so frikkin cool! I believe I’m going to have to spend an hour now setting that up on the rest of my sites.
Awesome man, glad that helped. I might have to write up a simple tutorial walking through the process so others struggling with this can have the option too.
Sounds like an excellent idea! I plan to write up something soon, about that, and about front end posting using Gravity Forms, since some of my most popular posts here are about that topic. 250 lines of code, or 15 minutes with a plugin….
Just finished setting up my registration form using gravity forms. Time to test everything to make sure it all works!