Thread

I’m managing a members only site - and pretty much everything is locked down to site members only.

Members are not automatically authorized - thats a human process to move them from a pending group to an actual members group.

Captchas are not in use - as soon as one member had problems, the site owner insisted they don’t get used :(

The problem I’m having is that I get *tons* of spam member signups - 10’s a week, compared to one or two real users. The spam to real user ratio is pretty terrible.

They are pretty easy to spot - once you have gotten to their profile - I have some required fields humans need to fill in, that default to the incorrect answer (such as “Are you a human? Yes/no - with No being the default drop down menu item) - but with the volume of users i’m getting, I’m wondering if there is anything I can do to prevent them even getting to sign up in the first place?

I found out today that one of the site moderators was emailing each one of these users to see if they were real members - from her regular mailbox - meaning any of the spammers that supplied an email address just got hers! Typical.

I’m wondering if there is anything I can do to prevent them even getting to sign up in the first place?

Yes, using a CAPTCHA. Sorry, but that’s exactly what they were made for, a way to “Tell Computer And Humans Apart”. Sorry, I really see not other way, if manual mdoeration is not an option.

I did figure as much - but wondered if anyone had thoughts around ways to make this more administrator friendly, or simply reduce the visibility to spammers - we’re not really looking for search engine traffic and don’t generate ad revenue or anything like that.