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?
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@example.net or joe@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.
>
>
>
>
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