Many Spamers creating profiles recently

BuZz

I use the anti spam plugin which helps with posts, but I have noticed recently a large number of spammers registering and using the user info / profile page to create an "Advert" for their services. They are not posting, just creating profiles which link to their website etc.

I don't believe this feature exists, but it would be useful if you could specify a user to not be able to set up a user profile info page until they have X posts or similar. This should stop them being able to do this.

I may open a ticket for the spam plugin to also send the profile info to akismet as I suspect it doesn't do that currently.

Any ideas are welcome. Going to go and delete the 20+ new spam accounts now that have appeared in the last 2 days.

BuZz

I saw the "minimum reputation" settings for the user profile. Apologies but I had missed this. I will use that to restrict the spammers user of the user profile info.

BuZz

I suspect a setting for X posts before they can change this info might be more suitable than reputation as we want to distinguish spammers from users, rather than the quality of users posts etc.

julian

That's a good idea for limiting profile setup. At present our current advice is to turn on the registration queue if you are seeing a surge of spambots registering.

BuZz

@julian Using the registration queue would add a lot more work for admins/mods though - but certainly it would help with this also.

Looks like the above has helped, but we are still getting some registrations - the spam accounts are now just putting the URL in the "Full name" field.