Deal with registration spam

[jonathanstegall]

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

In Drupal, we have the following functionality; all of which stops many many attempts each day:

• a honeypot field on the registration form
• block users where the first and last name are both 2 characters are less
• block users where the first and last names are equal and both contain a space
• check user data against the stopforumspam database

[jonathanstegall]

One addition I think we should do in WordPress is to disallow users from registering multiple versions of the same gmail address.

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/92065/disallow-google-other-email-plus-and-dot-tricks-when-registering

So for example: [email protected] would be fine, but if it already existed we would reject [email protected].

This gets complicated, kind of, because we don't want to stop people from using dots the first time they register (or pluses) but only on subsequent registrations, because that is a bot thing.

This is a separate issue now, #69.

[jonathanstegall]

We have the Stop Spammers plugin installed in WP but it is not activated. I think we should launch with it not activated for a bit, see how the site runs, and enable it if necessary. It appears to be quite aggressive.

[jonathanstegall]

As of 9/9/19, we've reinstalled the Stop Spammers plugin and activated it. It has relatively lenient configuration for now, I think, so it will probably still let it some spammers. But it's blocked 400 spammers in less than a day.

My biggest concerns are: 1) that nothing weird happens with user sessions, cookies, performance of any kind, and 2) that the plugin doesn't falsely block legit users.

I'd like to leave this issue open for a bit and make sure that issue is ok. Maybe after a month or a couple weeks, we can close it.

[jonathanstegall]

The plugin above continues to work pretty well. It has blocked 66984 spammers from either registering or leaving comments.

In the last month or so though I've noticed a rise in obvious bots who get through it. I'm not sure there's anything we can do about that but it's worth noting.