User Registration

I know many hundreds of you have registered here as users.

Alas, so have the spammers. I am currently under user registration spam attack: today and last night, a new fake user registers every few seconds,  I no have thousands of new fake users.

Alas, I have to, unfortunately, disable user registration.

That may or may not disable comments. A thousand apologies if it does, but I seem to have no other option. Either I sit here while I receive thousands of fake user registrations a day or I disable registering.

These spam users have domains advertising things and often, addresses ending in .pl, .ro and .ru (Poland, Romania and Russia, I fear your real users will be the losers here). No idea why they register because they then cannot do anything.

Also, I may also have to disable the emails that are being sent out. Right now for every legitimate user, ten emails are sent by my blog to these fake spammers. I do not have two hours a day to weed through the registrations: it is easy enough but takes time.

Anyone with any ideas, let me know. Yes I have tried various plugins but these do not work and are dangerous: one bad command, one wrong line of code  in a plugin will kill your entire WordPress.com blog.

5 thoughts on “User Registration

  1. Yech! I too, do not understand why spammers would register to receive email, except that they can. The possible reason would be to create some sort of denial of service attack, or for practice?

    I have not done anything with wordpress but at some sites when registering they provide a picture and you have to figure out what characters are in the picture and type them into a field. If you could incorporate that, it would presumably slow down the spammers.

    • “Captcha” – I have just installed that: we shall see.

      ADDED: no. Same problem. The Captcha works, you now need to decipher letters etc, but since I added that a few minutes ago, four new spam registrations already.

  2. I checked the wordpress forums and it seems to be a comon problem with the wordpress software and every one say’s use this plugin or that one or these 2 at the same time. I agree plugins are risky and no one says that they have found a problem with the software (at least admit it) disabling registration is a solution for now but I suspect when you try and trun it back on the “fakes” will come back. All I can say is try and shut it off for a week then turn it on and cross your fingers.

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