This Q2A is loaded with SPAM users

Question

@scott, @pupi1985, Yesterday this Q2A site was showing users 32.2k and today it shows 33.3k more than 1000 users registered in a day. Also 33k users dont seems real, I checked few user profile and they posted SPAM link in their profile. Please check newly registered users.

This issue I have seen on other Q2A site also. It happens even if recaptcha is enabled.

It is time to add extra screening/checks before registering new users. please think on this.

Comments

That comment brings up to step 1, I guess, and we'll have to talk about SPAM prevention and SPAM cleaning.

In your last comment you said you were going to post some issues of the user management plugin (SPAM cleaning) here. I haven't seen any post about that plugin in the last months. Just to clarify, I'll try to fix the issues (at least those that are relatively easy to fix) but I won't develop new features

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Yes, we can discuss about this SPAM feature in detail. I do see other people also complaining about this. My only one site was infected so much with this so I moved from q2a to other forum platform. I re-installed q2a site at least 5 time from backup to remove spam. You can imagine how much SPAM it was. Interestingly I dont see that much SPAM on other sites.

Please think about this SPAM protection feature seriously.

One option I can think of now is ....
1. allow registration email from certain domain, like gmail.com, yahoo.com or outlook.com only
2. dont allow registration email from certain domain like protonmail.com, mailinator.com etc
3. remove fb login plugin and come up with social login plugin, add fb, google, twitter, instagram, github etc in it. If there is spam then admin can enable registration only from these social sites.

I will think more on this and will post my more idea about SPAM protection.

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Items #1 and #2 are the same feature: filtering by domain. If I remember correctly, there already exists a plugin that does that.

Regarding #3, disabling registration by email seems to be too aggressive. I wouldn't join a site that doesn't allow me to use my email address to register. But that's probably my opinion and other people may think differently

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#1,#2 There is a plugin but dont know how stable it is. Why not discuss with owner of plugin and fork under official q2a github account. This way people will know that is  stable plugins.

btw, these are some features I feel should be in official q2a plugin or core.


#3 disabling registration using email can help if there is heavy spam. There will be other options like registration using gmail, twitter account still open. User can disable email registration for sometime.