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A Spam registration stopping trick

LeftBrainLeftBrain ✭✭
edited May 2014 in Tutorials

Like most people I've had problems with spammers applying for registration on my forum. I've tried a few techniques to stop them (RegistrationRestriction, BotStop, Akismet) and they have helped. However, still get about a dozen spam applicants a day.

It has always been a pain to click every single box of spammers just to decline their application. It annoyed me that there wasn't a way to click every box at one time and decline all the spam at once. Then I discovered...there is! Here's how.

  1. On the Manage Applicants approval page click the word "Action" which is just above the top box.
  2. This will check every box
  3. Then unclick the people who are not spammers and decline everyone else.

I just did this for my one forum which had 139 applicants (only 2 were real people)

Hope that helps. It saves me a lot of time.

Comments

  • peregrineperegrine MVP
    edited May 2014

    @LeftBrain

    good tip. I'm sure your tip on clicking the checkbox to select all will help people who weren't aware of that option in the dashboard.

    A more apt title would be "A tip on how to delete multiple spam applicants via the dashboard".

    since your tip is more related to dealing with deletion of applicant instead of stopping spam registration.

    That said, in the past and perhaps now, this method will fail with deleting masssive amounts of applicants. However, cleanser plugin has been helpful to some people for deleting massive numbers of applicants.

    That said, if you have a dozen spam applicants a day. you may want to review what these dozen spam applicants have in common to effectively stop and review the readme in the registrationrestrictlogger plugin to see if you can improve your patterns and ips files. As well as provide a more difficult questions with botstopapproval plugin, if you use that plugin.

    http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/207684/#Comment_207684

    I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.

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