Thread

I am wondering if there are any easy ways to cut down on both forum spam and member spam—the easiest would be a pre-approval that lets me choose whether to allow a comment or allow a new member.  I’m running a very small niche forum that doesn’t have very much traffic—just a rare comment/question now and then, so having something by hand wouldn’t be impossible. 

But perhaps there are other (better) ways to make this less of a spam magnet and only keep the real members coming through?  For some reason most of the spam is at “yahoo.co.uk” addresses so I could ban that with “*@yahoo.co.uk” but in the off chance some genuine users are using uk addresses I’d prefer not to ban members.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Hey ray20,
Spam is a battle that will always require some form of ground-keeping. With this in mind you have to decide how much effort you want to put into spam prevention vs. spam-triggered maintenance(manual approval).
There has been a lot of discussion on this so snoop around the forum for some specific ‘how to’.

Here is a quick rundown:
Registration:
- use captcha (or Accessible Captcha)
- use css trick to hide a non-required form field (display: none)
- change how captcha looks
Admin:
CP Home > Membership Preferences [General Configuration]
- change the Profile Triggering Word from ‘member’ to something else eg. ‘user’ or ‘player’ or ‘staff’ or ‘something irrelevant and obscure’...
- Require Member Account Activation

Here are some more ideas:
http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/fighting_registration_spam/

All the best!