12 April 2014, 16:30

Hi,

I've got a bot trying to register multiple times per days. Finally Hostgator contacted me saying that they'll close my account if I don't do something about it.

I understand that recaptcha will be available in 1.9. My current version is 1.7. What should I do in the meantime, before the new version comes out. When is the new version projected to come out?

Also, is it possible to distable registration from the front page completely, and only use the registrations through Mahoodle? That would solve my problem, as I don't use the front page registation anyway.

12 April 2014, 17:41

I have found this topic and followed the advice: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=223

Seems to be working.

14 April 2014, 12:07

Hi Tom,

Yeah, we had the same thing happen here at mahara.org back in February, which is the reason we implemented reCaptcha support. Part of the problem is that every time someone attempts to self-register, we send out an email to their email address to verify that it's correct. As a result when you get targeted by a bot, you send out a flood of emails, which makes your hosts angry.

Anyway, that thread is correct. To get rid of the frontpage "register" link entirely, you have to untick "Registration allowed" for every institution on your site.

In 1.9 there's also a site-level setting to enforce "Confirm registration" across all institutions, which will block the auto-creation of accounts, but does not block bots from attempting to register. And so it's no help for the problem of a flood of confirmation emails. For that, the reCaptcha is the best bet.

We're aiming to release 1.9.0 tomorrow.

It seems like bot activity has increased in the past year or so. Perhaps we ought to make it so that "Registration allowed" is disabled by default in new sites and institutions.

Cheers,

Aaron