Forums / General / New user spam
Jeroen Sangers
Thursday 16 August 2007 2:06:32 am
One of my sites is being attacked by spammers who are mass registering new users. It looks like they are randomly filling in the fields and submitting it, resulting in dozens of new users a day. As the new account is not confirmed, these users are still disabled and do not harm the site, but it gets very difficult to find the real users between all these spam-users, so each day I manually delete all these users.
Is there anything I can do to stop the spammers from creating these users (without blocking the genuine users), or to remove the disabled users automatically?
Lukasz Piech
Thursday 16 August 2007 3:37:48 am
How about implementing customantispam functionality into user/register template?
http://ez.no/community/contribs/workflow/peter_s_custom_anti_spam_image
Lukasz
Xavier Dutoit
Thursday 16 August 2007 4:31:53 am
Kristof released an akismet plugin just for that.
http://projects.ez.no/akismet
http://www.sydesy.com
Tuesday 21 August 2007 3:45:42 am
Thanks a lot Xavier,
I just installed the Akismet extension, and it seems to work fine.
Kristof Coomans
Tuesday 21 August 2007 6:54:24 am
Hi Jeroen
Thanks for trying it! In case you want to contribute something or if you have any remaining questions, then feel free to post a message to the eZ Akismet project forum.
independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org
Tuesday 21 August 2007 7:52:50 am
Hi Kristof,
I can't post on the Akismet project forum, as eZ Projects currently does not allow new registrations (it gave me an ugly kernel error).
Is there anywhere I can check what is happening, any kind of logging? I just noticed that three more dummy users have been created on my site, and would like to see why Akismet let them go through...
Wednesday 22 August 2007 12:27:58 am
Indeed you're right, new user registrations are currently not allowed. I forgot about this myself :)
Akismet probably didn't recognize those users yet as spam. You can still submit them as spam with the content action handler included with the extension, to train the web service. After some time it should detect them as spam as well :) Take a look at the main page of the project, I've put some instructions there on how to do this.
Thursday 23 August 2007 10:58:09 am
Thanks again. When I have some more time I will try it out.
One more thing: I noticed that many of the new users do not have a first name, last name, username or e-mail address, while when I try to create such a user myself I get an 'Input did not validate' error and it won't let me create the user. Anybody knows what is going on, and how the spammers are able to create users anyway?