Thread

I seem to be having a problem of sorts with someone (or something) trying to sign up for membership to my site.  Its been happening, with increasing frequency since last night.  Now they are coming trough about every 10 minutes or so. (another just came through as I am typing this!)

Its not really a problem since they can not get past guest membership unless I authorise it and obviously at the moment I’m just doing a mass delete when I log in.  They all are following the same format of random letters for the username and screen name with an invalid email account (since they do not for the most part move from pending to guest which is required to get to that level).

The only other problem with it is that my inbox is being flooded with the ‘New Membership’ emails.

Anyone have any insight as to why this might be happening and what ‘they’ want or stand to gain from this?  Is there a risk (potential or otherwise) that I just do not know about?

I mean there has always been a problem of spam and fake signups and fake comments to get links or whatever up for there own sights.  Most of this is controllable now and hasn’t until recently occurred that frequently since I locked down the commenting system to require my approval first.

(and there’s another one come in, so that’s two while I’ve been typing)  Honestly my site is just a travel blog so its not that popular!!!)

Any suggestions to stop this or at least make it controllable?

Cath

[Mod Edit: Moved to the EE 2 Tech Support forum]

Is there a captcha of some sort to your site when people sign up? If these were bots trying to sign up, they shouldn’t be able to get pass it. Also, why not try to remove notification option for new sign ups temporarily? Lastly, on the paranoid side, could there be anyone who is intentionally sabotaging you? 😊

Hi thanks for the reply!

I’ve found the pesky little button and deselected the the ‘notification of new members’ so hopefully that will stop the cascade of emails arriving.  Thanks that was a good suggestion.

I do have captcha on the site for sign on, that does not seem to be stopping them.  Interestingly even though the username etc is just a nonsense string of letters the email addresses being used must be real ones since these guys are coming up as ‘guests’ rather than ‘pending’

I found the Banning page under membership and banned the email address so hopefully anyone trying to sign up with that particular @ address will not be able to (at least I hope that is how it works.  Since its not a generic hotmail or gmail type email but an email address (multiples) from a particular website or so it seems.  They are strange though since the username part of the email address (the part before the @ is just a string of random seeming letters.

Can not imagine why anyone would do this deliberately (I’m not a corporation or anything).  Its a little irritating but that is about it unless there is something they can do that I’m not aware of.

Thanks for your input advia.

I am having the same problem. I have captchas enabled and have disabled the login link but I am still getting the membership requests. about one every minute.

Hi, all,

I am very sorry to all that did not receive technical support on this. It was in The Lounge, which we do not monitor for support issues.

To start - have you all read through Fighting Registration Spam? Those are the first steps to take here.