How to avoid registration

[Guest]

I just registered for this forum, but really, guys,
In the registration form, I was met with:

• 1 captcha (I despise captchas, stupid concept for stupid coders)
• 4 knowledge questions (Four! And I misspelled dehli and got all the fields cleared. Aaargh!)
• 1 yes/no question

If there was a competition on how to discourage people to sign up, you'd be in the top ten!

I run a number of web sites, with/out registration, comments, forums etc. and I have never been close to needing these measures to avoid spam/bots.
As for this forum's registration form, there is zero need for these hindrances as long as you use the "confirm registration email".
How many spambots do you know with a working email address?

(Sorry to use my first post in a forum for such a rant, but this has to be said.)

[kubicle]

Re: How to avoid registration

How many spambots do you know with a working email address?

Apparently some of them can get around that, since we had quite frequent spam waves some time ago.

4 questions seems a tad excessive, but I'll take a little inconvenience during one-time registration over spam anytime.

[dre12b]

Re: How to avoid registration

I just registered and have to agree. I almost quit after the second reset (for putting delhi not new delhi). I agree that spam is too be avoided, but there must be a way without so actively discouraging new registration. Not so surprising to see the high number of unregistered guests is it?

[TheBigAmbulance]

Re: How to avoid registration

To each their own I guess... I'm glad I went through the hassle. This forum has been very helpful at getting me weened from Windows and fully functional on Kubuntu.

The one that bothers me the worst is where they give you an image that you are supposed to retype. Some of the images are so horrible, no amount of time would give you the ability to read it.

[kiraitachi]

Re: How to avoid registration

I honestly prefer having those measures to have a wave of spam bots or worse....honestly...i think that aint that bad, kinda normal security a forum would have...besides that im pretty happy with kubuntu forums since all the users here are noob friendly and very nice, since they helped me out a lot of times when i most needed them and with a very fast support response....so i prefer taking of my laziness and fill out the registration chart and then have a good support with no bots or spams or ****ty people... :P

[GreyGeek]

Re: How to avoid registration

During the last week in December and the first week in January I received 87 emails notifying me of msgs posted by spambots. I also encountered several while I was reading the posts and deleted them and blocked the account. The other moderators have probably seen and eliminated more than I did during that period. Clearly, our spambot prevention methods were not adequate, so they were incremented until the spambot were reduced to acceptable levels.

In testing the newer security methods I flunked the "Capital of India" question too (I thought it was Mumbi), so I did a google search. But then, I am not smarter than a fifth grader!

[Telengard]

Re: How to avoid registration

A small one-time inconvenience at registration is far preferable to having the forum filled with spam. There has been a scary amount of spam in the last year or so, and I congratulate our mods for dealing with it so efficiently. I am grateful for the measures taken to reduce the number of bots which can bypass those measures.

One thing which might also help is to increase the minimum acceptable password length. I have a feeling that some old accounts could be hijacked by simple brute forcing where people have chosen weak passwords.

[GreyGeek]

Re: How to avoid registration

Spambots, like real people, create their own passwords, but most are just drive by shootings and it doesn't matter what their password is. If they drive by again they just create a new account. I've blocked several spambots that came from the SAME IP address.

BTW, if you click on "Last Click" in the right column you see a listing of everyone who is on line, their IP address, and the message they are reading at the moment. Notice the IP addresses that start with 65.55.*.*. Those are "Guest"s from Microsoft. Probably spiders reading the forum for Bing.

[Snowhog]

Re: How to avoid registration

As Moderators, and Open Source himself - our Host - we would love to find that balance between inconvenience to prospective new members, and security to KFN and our existing members. Unfortunately, spammers have, are, and continue to be, very clever in their approaches to breaching defenses of any web sight. KFN has been no exception.

We have had rashes of spammers/bots get into KFN over the last year. They were usually caught quickly, but not before spamming KFN with unsolicited 'business links' and pornography.

The current account request method has, so far, nearly eliminated these spammers/bots from gaining entry - so far. But past history tells us that it will only be a matter of time, before even these barriers are breached.

KFN has no desire to prevent any 'real' person with a desire to join KFN for the purpose of gaining from and contributing to our growing community of Kubuntu users, from gaining an account. What's worth having, is worth working for. The current method employed for getting an account in KFN is not overly hard. I've seen harder on other sites.

Snowhog
Global Moderator

[kiraitachi]

Re: How to avoid registration

BTW, if you click on "Last Click" in the right column you see a listing of everyone who is on line, their IP address, and the message they are reading at the moment. Notice the IP addresses that start with 65.55.*.*. Those are "Guest"s from Microsoft. Probably spiders reading the forum for Bing.

Wow thats interesting XD Microsoft taking a look in linux haha, yeah surely they might be changing the code of the bing searcher make it better cause right now is still beta as far as i now...

[Guest]

Re: How to avoid registration

I had a hard time registering, not because I couldn't answer the questions (delhi should also be accepted) but because the captcha isn't in the tab order on the form so the first time I filled out the form I inadvertently put the answer to the captcha in the box for the question 'What year is it'. After a few tries of it not working I searched the forum to see if the answers were posted anywhere and found this thread. It still took me another couple of tries before I spotted my error. I don't know if I'm the norm or not but it's easy to do if you're using the tab key flying through the sign up.

If possible, inserting the captcha in the tab order would ease registration for keyboarders such as myself.

[GreyGeek]

Re: How to avoid registration

I just finished removing a spam posting and banning the account which posted it, which was created this morning for just that single post. So, even our elevated security wall isn't keeping all of them out.

The options are to make the security wall even higher, or to go have the mods personally approve each registration request. Anyone have any other ideas?

[skunk]

Re: How to avoid registration

The options are to make the security wall even higher, or to go have the mods personally approve each registration request. Anyone have any other ideas?

Perhaps you could prohibit newly registered users from posting URLs in their messages.

[claydoh]

Re: How to avoid registration

The options are to make the security wall even higher, or to go have the mods personally approve each registration request. Anyone have any other ideas?

Perhaps you could prohibit newly registered users from posting URLs in their messages.

I have looked into that, but the mod for that does not prevent the spammer form posting. And at least for the stable version of the forum software, it only disables urls, images, etc from signatures, not in the body itself. The upcoming version will have better protections and options built-in, as well as more useful mods, but that probably won't be out for some time.

[vinnywright]

Re: How to avoid registration

he he he ........... I remember moding/addmining over at the late Ultimalinux forums.......................I spent as mutch time sooting spamaru (my pet name for spamers) and adding IP's to the blocklist as ansering user queshtons ...........it was a dayley ritual some times severall times a day..........

VINNY