[support] How to safeguard sites from unwanted users

[Kamal Palei]

I am thinking of below solution.

For my site, it is easy for us to find who are unwanted users using some
mechanism. I am planning to write a custom module, that will allow
administrator to list down unwanted users and these users references I will
keep in a separate table , lets call it *table-a*. When a new user
registers, I will check table-a, and if any entry found, I will use that
entry's UID, for new user. Thereby over the time, anytime you see the
unwanted users in my site will be less.

Best Regards
Kamal
Net Cloud Systems, Bangalore-08


On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Jamie Holly <hovercrafter at earthlink.net>wrote:

> The goal is to make it more difficult for people to register unwanted
> accounts. You aren't going to stop it completely. Email verification is
> just another hoop for them to jump through, one that is also accepted by
> a vast majority of regular users. It should always be used.
>
> Something I did for a client last year was a custom module. It did a few
> things. First we could set the number of registrations per IP in a given
> time frame. After that the account requires admin approval. It also
> recorded all the request headers so that I could look for a pattern,
> which I ended up finding. Once I was able to isolate that, I blocked
> that pattern from registering, which took a client's site from a few
> hundred spam registrations per day, down to one or two per week. Per my
> agreement with that client, I can't give out that pattern, but doing
> something similar on any site wouldn't be that complex.
>
> A common practice now is for companies to hire people to generate these
> accounts. They then use the accounts to spam your site. After that a
> company contacts you regarding the spam on your site, offering to "clean
> it up" and help your seo rankings. Very, very dirty indeed.
>
> The interesting part of that is what we found out. The registrations
> were happening from IP addresses all around the globe, yet the actual
> spam postings were mostly from U.S. IP addresses and over 70% were from
> hosting companies that offer VPS. We were successful in getting one
> hosting company to shut down an account, but most just ignore it.
>
> The whole morale of the story is vigilance. Things like CAPTCHA, email
> verification and keeping bad user accounts to prevent reuse of bad names
> and emails all give an extra layer of security (albeit not all that
> much). Or do you believe in leaving the front door of your home standing
> wide open, when you aren't there?
>
>
> Jamie Holly
> http://www.intoxination.net
> http://www.hollyit.net
>
> On 6/21/2013 1:56 AM, John Summerfield wrote:
> > On 12/06/2013 10:37 PM, Jamie Holly wrote:
> > > +1 to that! Also, they can't reuse the email. Make it harder on them,
> > > not easier.
> >
> > Reread gmail's rules about its email addresses. One can generate any
> > number of alternatives for any one email address. Besides, unless one
> > requires email addresses to be verified during registration, users can
> > use anything at all, even fred at example.net or joe at domain.test (both of
> > which _can_ be valid).
> >
> > Email hosts often allow +arbitrarySuffix to the localpart of email
> > addresses, but the "+" can be another arbitrary character, I've seen
> > hyphens used.
> >
> > And then there are some domains where everything is delivered, if not to
> > a specific addressee then to a default address and that too is
> configurable.
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
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