By Nacho Love on

Hi all,

My site's been up about a year, and am just now starting to get decent traffic. I have captcha enabled and am running Drupal 5x because I am using the advanced forum and advanced profile.

I have a block on my site that I display in the left margin that shows newly registered users. The weird thing is, I see NONE of these new spam users in this list, yet when I check under user management or under content, I see a usernode and user profile created for each of these spam users (this is also what I see when someone creates a legitimate user the standard way through Drupal). And they're throwing in a bunch of spam/porn links in their user profiles, which is very frustrating.

Anybody have an idea of what is happening here, and how I can stop it?

Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Antiquitties’s picture

Antiquitties commented

Hi!

I'm using Drupal 6.x, but I think it's the same in 5.x. What other modules that change the way users register do you have enabled on your site? I noticed on a previous thread that you were looking for an easy way to capture email, maybe this module allows registration also, I don't know.

Also I think you can check the Drupal system log (in administration somewhere) for anything unusual (in 6.x is highlighted in red).

An url of your website would help as well.

Thanks,

Valentin

Nacho Love’s picture

Nacho Love commented

Thanks for the response.

I don't believe I have any other modules enabled that would allow a user to register in another way, but I certainly could be wrong.

For email capture I have employed a 3rd party application that is completely independent of drupal (you'll see it on the homepage).

My URL is http://www.alifelessanxious.com

Thanks!

Antiquitties’s picture

Antiquitties commented

Good work on your site!

I think you should try to give as much information as possible, it's hard to guess what could be the problem. Is this a problem with the blog only or just the forum or both?

I found a reason here http://drupal.org/node/526486 of why the users don't show on What's New block. Apparently if the user does not confirm the registration (i.e. clicking the link in the confirmation email) then it will not show-up in the Who's new block. But if the user is not confirmed then why can the user post any comments (some security issues, I don't know).

You should check the watchdog report regularly to make sure your site is working properly.

You can

* view watchdog logs at Administer >> Logs >> Recent log entries (admin/logs/watchdog).
* configure the length of time logs are archived at Administer >> Site configuration >> Error reporting (admin/settings/error-reporting).

I'm sorry I can't help you more, maybe it's a bug with one of the modules, I would try and update them if there was no custom work made.

Nacho Love’s picture

Nacho Love commented

Really appreciate the help. I will investigate what you recommended and see what I can dig up. Thanks again, cheers!

nateb123’s picture

nateb123 commented

I don't know if this issue has been solved. I had the same problem, a bunch of new users using a Russian email provider and forum topics being posted with hundreds of links to porn and illegal downloads.

At first I though I could solve the problem manually, by blocking any user activation manually. I tried a few captcha systems that were useless and then I tried Mollom. Problem solved! Mollom worked from day one to this day! Ive tried other services like this before (recaptcha) and was afraid to commit to another, but Mollom is amazing. Simple install, get the keys and youre done.