Due to my site being plagued with spam, I've been deleting manually thousands of spam accounts.
I have come to the conclusion that 99% of "normal" users do not use the following user 'attributes'.

In reality, they are all just different ways for spammers to advertise. Especially the ones that let you have web links inside them.

So, I would like to know, how do you delete all these fields, or disallow new users from filling them out?

Real Name
Website (URL)
ICQ
AIM
YIM
MSNM
Occupation
Interest
Extra Info
Signature


Also, I would like to disallow new users from posting links in their threads and posts until they have reached at least X number of posts (like 5 posts or something). I thought I saw this option somewhere, but I can only find an option for uploading an avatar after X posts, not one for including links with messages, etc. Does anyone know how to do this too?


many thanks,
Veqryn

(ps: using version 2.4.4 of xoops)

Horror! On our site there are no spam. What we have done - Changed registration form. Robot in any case not be able to register. If you have the strength to create a website, then change the registration form should not be too difficult. We instead need to choose the correct captcha answer.

Enough to replace the standard version, and you forget about spam. If you lack knowledge, we are ready for a small fee to save you from spam.

(Do not speak English , mechanical translation, who are not satisfied , just send yourself)
Ужас!!! На нашем сайте спама вообще нет. Что мы сделали - Измененная форма регистрации. Робот в любом случае не сможет зарегистрироваться. Если вам хватило сил создать сайт, то изменить формы регистрации уж не должно составить труда. У нас вместо капчи необходимо выбрать правильный ответ.

Достаточно сменить стандартный вариант, и вы забудете о спаме. Если вам не хватает знаний, то мы готовы за небольшое вознаграждение избавить вас от спама.

I am afraid prevention against robots registering is not the answer anymore. Nowadays poor people from countries like India get paid to make those accounts. Also many sorts of captcha can be written by computers nowadays.

I'm not sure if protector in xoops 2.4.4 already had a stopforumspam option, I believe not... Protector in Xoops 2.5.5 has, and it has proven to prevent a lot of spam. Other module I use is Xortify, it works with a central cloud server connected to all kinds of security and anti spam services. After installing both options spam and fake registering counts are very low on my site. It happens once a month or less...

In the user profile module you can remove unwanted fields.

Come on MACTEP, this is basic stuff and he is a beginner and needs help, why exploit it?

veqryn,
If you go into your adminstation and select the module User Profile. Under the settings menu you will see an option called "fields". Open that and you will see every field and a column to the right with a control that lets you toggle each field. By toggling the field you can de-select the ones you don't want to appear in your registration.

If you are using XOOPS 2.5.5, you can also set protector to automatically consult the stopforumspam.com database and stop a known forum spammer in his/her tracks. There are lots of other kinds of spam than what this site tracks. To set it, open your protector module, then click its preferences setting and go all the way to the bottom to set it.

It uses CURL so that has to be enabled on your host for it to work.

I have had sources from the balkans manually create an account to get past the captcha, then program their spamrobot with the authentication. Since XOOPS had no login captcha (only registration), then a captcha would not stop a bot from logging in after manual registration.

It would be worth a look at your inteneded service area... do you just want your site to serve a region such as United States and Canada, or just europe, but you are getting lots of spam from locations irrelevant to your service area like Nigeria or Argentina?. Then you could go the LARGE htacces route and filter out (or filter in) IP address ranges of entire nations, or group of nations. blockacoutry.com used to provide the entire htaccess code with IP data by nation but I just checked and it seems like they are having a little bit of trouble staying online. I once blocked out all of Ukraine this way, as it was a beehive of spam.

Blocking countries is a possibility, but I have some doubts xoobaru. It is blocking a whole region because just a few people living over there misbehave. This is not my idea of a free internet. Xoops has some good working tools for fighting spam, so I would advise veqryn to update Xoops to 2.5.5 first and enable stop forum spam in protector. Installing Xortify would be a good next step.