Managing Spam Account Registrations

[[R] NuclearGeneral]

Managing Spam Account Registrations

 

We are receiving reports that the number of spam bot registrations have been increasing in recent days. It is an unfortunate reality that spammers occasionally find new ways to get past even our best defenses. IPS will of course continue to work on improvements to stay ahead of them as they in turn try to stay ahead of us.

 

IP.Board has many built in functions and features to help to manage spam account registrations and either block or ban these accounts.

 

 

Spam Monitoring Service

 

Our Spam Monitoring Service is one of the best tools you can use to help protect your community from spam account registrations. The service collects anonymous data from the many thousands of IP.Board's using the service and detect trends to learn which accounts may be spammers. It then uses that data to automatically ban accounts that register on your community.

 

We also encourage you to report spam accounts that slip past the service by clicking the "Flag as Spammer" link on the profile popup, profile page, or in the AdminCP. When you flag an account, IP.Board reports that status back to the Spam Monitoring Service so it can learn from that information.

 

The Spam Monitoring Service is free to all active IP.Board license holders. To enable it just be sure your license key is setup in your AdminCP and then go to System Settings, Members, Spam Service.

 

 

reCAPTCHA

 

IP.Board includes support for Google's reCAPTCHA service. Enabling reCAPTCHA is another line of defense to determine if a registering account is a real human or a spam bot.

 

To enable reCAPTCHA visit your AdminCP and go to System Settings then Security and Privacy.

 

 

Question and Answer Challenge

 

Another very useful tool to stop spam bot registrations is the custom Question and Answer challenge built into IP.Board. Using this feature you can set a custom question unique to your community that only a real human could answer. For example, you might say "What color is the sky?" and, though a bot could answer that, it would have to be programmed specifically for your community which spammers would not do. Choose a unique question and you get an easy, extra layer of protection.

 

To enable simply go to your AdminCP and click the Question and Answer Challenge settings right on the System tab of the AdminCP home page.

 

 

Email Validation

 

While easily bypassed by an intelligent spam bot, make sure you also have new account email validation enabled (under Security and Privacy in AdminCP) as the email validation works alongside the Spam Monitoring Service's ability to learn spammer's email addresses.

 

 

 

 

As is also true for email spam, we will never have a 100% method to stop community spam account registrations but by utilizing the tools built into IP.Board you can certainly take real action to lessen the impact. IPS will continue to research methods to enhance spam protection.

 

View the full article at IPS