we are getting so many spam registrations that i decided to try disabling the hidden captcha module & see whether the ordinary captcha thing on its own is more effective at deterring those irritating spammers ... we can monitor it & see whether we need to try something else.
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well we are still getting
well we are still getting around 3-4 spam registrations per day. any idea what better module we could use to discourage this??
trying an additional required field
i've had a look at the captcha alternatives that agnez suggested:
http://drupal.org/project/mollom
http://drupal.org/project/antispam
http://drupal.org/project/spamicide
http://drupal.org/project/botcha
http://drupal.org/project/hidden_captcha
the problem with all of these, i think, is that they are still all aimed at stopping bots - whereas our spam problem is, i think, humans who are completing the forms. i have researched & it seems that there are spam companies that will pay people per registration, to sign up manually at sites. so we need a way to stop or discourage human spam registratants, without making it too difficult for genuine users ... sigh ...
the only common thing that i can see about the spam registrations we are getting, is that they tend to use the same letter combination for each of username, first name, middle name & surname. i thought about trying to find a way to not allow this, e.g. that the first name and surname can't be the same - but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this through the admin interface.
so i am trialling the addition of a new required field, "Why do you want to join the Magdalena Project?" - asking them to say in a few sentences what is their interest & past involvement. this won't stop spammers but maybe it will be one more thing to slow them down ...
if this doesn't make any difference (we are currently getting 3-6 spam registrations per day) then i would like to try & find some way to prevent the name fields being the same thing (it's possible but unlikely that we'll get a user who really does have two names the same) & perhaps have something that, when someone tries to enter the same name, temporarily blocks them from the site for a period of a few hours. as far as i can see, something like this doesn't exist, but there is quite a bit of discussion about human spam so i will join that thread & contribute this idea.
no captcha?
actually i have just tested the registration form, & didn't encounter any captcha field. i know that we had hidden captcha, which meant that only bots would fill it in, but i thought i had disabled this & that a human-visible captcha field should be there. but it seems that there is no captcha at all working at the moment. i've looked at all the settings & can't work out why it isn't showing up on the registration form.
mollum does the trick
i installed mollum about a week ago & since then we have had one spam registration :)