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Filtering out SPAM registrations

1 year 4 months ago #334531 by researchware
Filtering out SPAM registrations was created by researchware
I may have asked this question a long time ago, but Community Buillder features have changed/expanded since then. We get a lot of SPAM registrations of a specific form (see examples below) for the person's name. The SPAM bot firstname lastname string is always <string> <samestring><2-CAPITAL-LETTERS>. I am wondering is there is anyway to filter these our automatically. The SPAM bot seems to successfully complete the CAPTCHA we have on the registration form. We use CB Captcha set to Joomla, which is set to reCAPTCHA.

The samples of the Name patterns are:
Altonproky AltonprokyQD
Robertunato RobertunatoXM
Timothytib TimothytibBI
JamesDaw JamesDawMD
AnthonyWap AnthonyWapLT
CoreyMit CoreyMitJB
Richardgrism RichardgrismQT
RodneyKak RodneyKakYQ
Ronaldwig RonaldwigLF
Donaldfax DonaldfaxFH
HenryRak HenryRakJP
ArmandLap ArmandLapNI
Samuelviorp SamuelviorpSE
Justinlot JustinlotFY
WarrenHok WarrenHokBT
GordonSer GordonSerQI
Davidknivy DavidknivyJA
Charlesdug CharlesdugTX
Delbertsah DelbertsahFR
ParkerDat ParkerDatLW
JamesCox JamesCoxBV
RonaldObelp RonaldObelpPQ
RaphaelFic RaphaelFicPD
ScottHic ScottHicYF
Michaelsef MichaelsefGA
Bernardtaw BernardtawRG
Scotttew ScotttewUY
StanleyTaf StanleyTafCF
LarryKeync LarryKeyncPJ
Robertjoype RobertjoypeOR
VictorRoors VictorRoorsQX

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1 year 3 months ago #334538 by krileon
Replied by krileon on topic Filtering out SPAM registrations
reCaptcha is easy for bots to beat. It's mostly useless these days. Try using the internal captcha. It can be completely customized, which usually means for a bot to beat it the bot has to be customized for your site specifically making it a lot more difficult for the average bot to get in. I suggest just giving the internal captcha defaults a try for awhile and if that's not working out maybe use question based captcha or math based captcha as sometimes the bots have no computational behavior and are just doing image recognition.

As for the naming issue the only thing I can think of is apply custom validation to the field to mark the field as invalid if common structures like that are supplied so the registration will be denied. This can be done with CB Code Field, which provides custom PHP based validation for fields.

The be honest though it's just a race against the clock at this point. AI image recognition has gotten so good the traditional captchas we've used for years are going to no longer be useful. I'm looking into several other new captcha solutions to be supported in CB AntiSpam in future releases that might further combat this. They all honestly though make for a worse experience for the user unfortunately.


Kyle (Krileon)
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1 year 3 months ago #334558 by researchware
Replied by researchware on topic Filtering out SPAM registrations
Thank you. We'll change the CAPTCHA and look at using Code Field as some sort of check for First and Last name. I do know PHP, so I'm pretty sure I can code something to check if Firstname (.*) \1 is equal to Lastname \1..
The following user(s) said Thank You: krileon

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