Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a significant increase in the number of ’users’ registering on my blog, getting up to 30 per day. Given that users don’t need to register on my site to leave comments, then these registrations are coming from spammers trying to leave register in case they need to leave comments.
Luckily, I moved over to the fantastic Disqus commenting system a few weeks ago which is thrawting these spammers. It’s also reduced the amount of comment spam I get in general, because the spambots clearly haven’t turned their attentions to Disqus yet, or Disqus has better protection than wordpress.
If you don’t want to switch to Disqus (I would recommend doing so), then you could try intalling the SABRE WordPress Plugin. This plugin offers a number of tools to stop wordpress spam registrations:
- Inclusion of a captcha in the registration form
- Selection of the captcha’s complexity
- Selection of the background colour for the captcha image
- Inclusion of a math test in the registration form
- Selection of the math test’s complexity
- Random or fixed choice of the test to run
- Unobstrusive tests to detect if registration is done by humans or not
- Registration blocked if Javascript is unsupported by the browser
- Registration blocked if visitor’s IP address is found on ban lists
- The blog administrator can validate the user registration
- The user can validate his registration by clicking on a link sent by mail
- Limit the number of days to confirm registration. Without beeing confirmed within the period of time, the user account is disabled
- Log on prohibited before confirmation
- User is allowed to choose his password when registering on the blog
- User must agree with a warning text, disclaimer or general policy note when registering
- User must give an invitation code during registration
- Main statistics displayed on the blog’s dashboard
- Custom logo on logon/registration screen
