How to deal with spam registrations

[anooxy]

I'm curious to know, does NodeBB offer something to prevent spambots from registering? E-mail activation could a good measure too.

[finid]

@anooxy

Currently, there's none, though one has been proposed. See Anti-spam solution for registration page #1213.

[anooxy]

Until then I'm manually deleting spam users, but oh boy they're piling up fast.

[finid]

@anooxy

Yep, manual deletion is the only solution at this time.

[Chris]

Even something as basic as a hidden form field that when filled out denies registration would stop most of the registration bots. It would do nothing to the human operated ones, but the automated ones are the more annoying ones, IMO.

[julian]

@chris We have a CSRF in place for both register and login

[finid]

@julian

They don't seem to be stopping bot registrations. I know they can't post, but maybe the good part is it's a boost to the number of registered users.

[Chris]

@julian said:

@chris We have a CSRF in place for both register and login

[anooxy]

@julian I checked most emails from those spambots and CleanTalk had almost all of them in their antispam list. Unfortunately it doesn't offer a Javascript way to access their API. I'm thinking of 'talking' to a PHP script while doing the registration just to check against their antispam list via HTTP requests.

Actually I don't see any antispam solution for node.js except yandex cleanweb which I saw somewhere.

On a side note, how are total users counted? Deleting users doesn't seem to lower the count just saying.