Beef up spam prevention on user registration form

[brockboland]

Beef up spam prevention on user registration form

[emperorcow]

So I have been fighting this battle for months. I've tried multiple different spam modules, custom code, and a great deal of head/wall bashing. The one thing that I've noticed and had forgotten is that these spam accounts will usually put the same thing in for first and last name. Is it possible to write a module that checks for that and then denies the user creation?

[brockboland]

Definitely, that will stop some. I think I asked you about Honeypot at some point before: that was causing problems with an existing module, right?

[emperorcow]

So during the recent server migration I got rid of everything but mollom. Additionally, CloudFlare and their spam prevention stuff is now sitting in front of the site instead of the varnish proxy we were using before. At this point, there are no proxies in front of us. It feels like the total number of sign-ups have gone down, but what are your thoughts? Should we convert from Mollom to honeypot?

[brockboland]

Yep, looks like the number has dropped, so maybe we're fine. I've only seen a couple actual spam comments come through in the past month or so.

Some junk user cleanup might not be a bad idea: a simple module to delete any user who registered more than x days ago and hasn't logged in since. That would be easy enough to write—better yet, we could probably just do it with the Rules module. Just need to do plenty of testing on a dev site first to make sure it's not going to nuke everyone.

[emperorcow]

I actually did that about 4 weeks ago, deleted about 1700 users or so that had either never logged in, or who's first and last name were the same. I found that those were the common denominators after dumping the entire user list out to CSV and doing some quick analysis in Excel. I'm going to go ahead and close this for now, feel free to re-open if necessary.

[brockboland]

Sounds good to me!