Several things you can do…

first, registration is the realm of WP… they register users on the site – the forum just allows those users to access the forum…  there are many plugins our there for WP that can improve the registration process including approval and confirmation emails…  without a confirmation email, the user wont get created..

second is the use of our captcha plugin… not perfect, but it drastically reduces the amount of spam registrations and even spam posts if you allow guest posting..

Mr Papa thanks for your answer. I already have a captcha, I think it’s inbuild in the registration process, it asks the user to do a sum. That is why I am a bit puzzled that these strange users appear! Some of them also change the password! I will look into the SP captcha plugin.

In any case, can you please give the name of one or two WP plugins for registration? There are so many out there… Thanks 😉

No, not talking about math question. Those are easily defeated by bots. You should use a image captcha where you have to pick out letters from an image. Not infallible but much better than math. 

Suggest checking out the theme my login plugin for wp. 

Thanks a lot, Mr Papa! 🙂

glad to help…

Hallo, unfortunately I am back here with this issue. Now my registration has these 2 features:

– confirmation via email required

– captcha by image and letters within

So I inserted both as you suggested. It worked for a few days an now I just got again a few registrations of fake users.

Any other idea please? 

Did you go to the forum admin > Components > Login and Registration – and turn in the option to ‘Add Captcha form to WP registration/signup form’?

Hi YS 🙂

At first I had the “Use spam tool on registration form” checked but that shows only the math question. Them Mr Papa suggested to use some better spam tool as a captcha. I have a plugin for this, Si Captcha plugin which I turned on for registration purposes. After that I turned the SP “Use spam tool on registration form” off to avoid to have both the captcha and the math question. If you try registering to my forum you will see right away that there’s a captcha there 😉

Is that what you meant?

No – misunderstanding. I thought you were using our captcha plugin which can be used on the registration form.

Sadly spam registrants and posters are one of the prices of running a website. As far as the forum is concerned, our combination of our own captcha seems to have almost eradicated this but this is, of course, a website-level issue at the end of the day and the best place to seek help is in the WP plugins repository.

No – misunderstanding. I thought you were using our captcha plugin which can be used on the registration form.

Sadly spam registrants and posters are one of the prices of running a website. As far as the forum is concerned, our combination of our own captcha seems to have almost eradicated this but this is, of course, a website-level issue at the end of the day and the best place to seek help is in the WP plugins repository.

Thanks a lot. I deactivated the wp captcha plugin I was using and now I am using the sp captcha instead. In Italian it was translated to verbose (doh!) and I remade the translation shortening the sentences, so the plugin does not overlap with the final sentence announcing that a confirmation email will be received. Let’s hope it helps.

I still don’t understand why “humans” would want to register for nothing to my foum which is very small, bahhh 😀

Thanks

A lot of them, are carried out by bots. Like you I have no idea of the dumb intelligence behind people who do this but mostly they do not register in person.

But they also change the password! I get the email saying so. So it’s not just registration, they surely cannot be bots… or am I missing to see how can that be automated? It is really frustrating 🙁 I don’t mind having to delete them manually, or I could use the spam plugin too, but I would like to understand how can a bot do that: going through the SP captcha or other types of captchas and then login and change the password too! 🙁 

If they beat our SP captcha then they are probably human. You need to do some ‘googling’ as I am sure you can learn a lot more than I have knowledge of…