By naught101 on

One of the sites I run is a spam magnet. It also seems to get a massive number of spam sign-ups, ie. accounts which get created and never used. I'm guessing they're from spambots which blindly fill in the form and then forget.

I have captcha installed, and am considering using the "spam" module's user checker, but I have a feeling that might require "profile" to be enabled to be really effective.

In the mean time, does anyone have any suggestions for getting rid of the ~600 unused users already existing on the site? I was thinking of just deleting all users with a 0 in the "login" column in the DB, but I'm not sure if that does what I think it does...

Comments

Rhino’s picture

Rhino commented

Install "advanced user" module, delete all users that are marked "never logged in". Works like a dream and is very useful for other things as well, you'll find it creates a tab on the admin/user page and you'll wonder what you ever did without it before.

Also, I'm having the same problem with a mass of stubborn spam users signing up - and am asking for ideas to keep them away here: http://drupal.org/node/455090

So far I have spam module installed, I require captcha (math), I even have a small checkbox that needs to be checked "if you're human" and still, the spam users kept coming. Right now I've set the user signups to be moderator approved, and only after that had been on for four hours did they (knock on wood, spit three times) stop. I was getting a spam user every five to ten minutes with all that captcha+checkboxes+spam module on - this slowed down to every ten to fifteen minytes with the "Moderator approval" on, and perhaps they have given up now.

So I hear you on the spam users problem. I don't know what started the sudden burst of spam to my site, it was as if I ended up on some "easy spam target" list somewhere. (Incidentally, there is a huge increase of email spam being bounced by my mailserver as well).

naught101’s picture

naught101 commented

might be worth checking if your captcha is working properly - sometimes the seem to be able to be skipped. If it is, maybe you've got a spammer with a bot that can figure out maths captchas? could try giving image captcha or re-captcha a go.

I'll take a look at advanced user.

cheers
ned

tobias’s picture

tobias commented

Thanks Rhino - I am having the same problem on my site starting today (~600 new accounts created just in the last 12 hours) and have turned on captcha.. but now need to delete all the accounts.

Is there a way to have the user invisible until s/he has activated the account and logged in? This would be another workaround.

Cheers,

Tobias