Bogus Registrations

[informatics-dev]

• Original ID: 4466
• Added by lukas.scharer lukas.scharer
• Scratchpads URL: http://macrostomorpha.info

Description:

I am increasingly getting bogus registrations on my site ( about 2-4 per week), of people that are evidently not scientists, but who give bogus names, silly addresses and doubtful credentials. Can you think of a way of avoiding that? Deleting these is not much work, but it is a rather annoying. One consideration, however, is that if they are evidently bogus they are easier to just delete than if they are compelled to add actual University addresses. Cheers, Lukas.

Attachments:

• https://github.com/NaturalHistoryMuseum/scratchpads2/blob/issue-attachments/904/Screen%20Shot%202016-03-15%20at%2012.29.32%20PM.png

[informatics-dev]

Comment by Simon Rycroft

We are already doing what we can to prevent bogus site registrations (CAPTCHA and Honeypot), and were previously blocking large numbers of dirty IP addresses. Even though legitimate users could work around us blocking their IP address, by entering a CAPTCHA, we found we had to stop blocking the dirty IP addresses due to it being a little too annoying for many of our users. Ever since we have stopped blocking these dirty IP addresses, the quantity of bogus site signups has gone up. We will continue to look into new ways of preventing them but, for now, there is nothing more we can do.

[informatics-dev]

Comment by lukas.scharer lukas.scharer

I would like to give a brief update on this. Since my original post I have received another 24 bogus registrations, so on average about one every second day. Do other scratchpads receive similar amounts of bogus registrations? Cheers, Lukas.

[informatics-dev]

Comment by John P. Sullivan

I am having this problem, also. Here's one detail that might suggest a way to block them. With all of these spam accounts, the same name is entered for the Given Name and Family Name fields. Could there be an auto-delete function for anyone signing up this way, or a trans-Scratchpad periodic purge of all such accounts?

[alycejenni]

Suggested in #6139 and #6271: disallow numeric names

[therobyouknow]

Following up - questions:

I'm assuming this is still an ongoing issue, is that right?

Is this issue covered sufficiently in the other tickets such that we can close this ticket as duplicate and continue with progress on them? https://github.com/NaturalHistoryMuseum/scratchpads2/issues/6139 https://github.com/NaturalHistoryMuseum/scratchpads2/issues/6271

Is the site still in use? http://macrostomorpha.info/ It appears not to be - see screenshot. Though I'd assume other sites are having this issue: