Ok, my other post got locked, so I'll repost it here, where the moderator wants it.
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I just cannot believe this. I've tried everything to prevent spam sign-ups. The visual identification where you have to enter a series of numbers is utterly useless. Setting it so that the admin must approve the registration is also pointless because I end up having to sign in and delete half a dozen new spam accounts every day.
Why has phpBB never taken the simple, logical step of having a simple setting in the control panel/configuration that turns off all registration?
I came up with my own solution, which worked perfectly. In the disallowed username field, I simply added an asterisk (*) and that's all. It's a wildcard. In other words, no matter what user name you try registering, it says "that userame not allowed". Worked fine. No need to go weed out the daily spam accounts, and when someone wanted to join, I simply disabled that setting, signed them up, and re-enabled it.
Well, just now I got a new spammer signed up despite the (*) wildcard filter being on. He signed up as:
Íàøà Ìàøà :$)
And it has a spam link in it, it's definitely a spammer account. (Note: I added an $ between the : and the ) so that the forum would not turn it into a smiley emoticon. Take out the $ and it's a cut and paste of the original user name.
How the hell did he bypass the filter that disallows ALL usernames?
phpBB really needs to address this terrible weakness. So what do I do now? I certainly don't want to go back to having to delete multiple spam accounts each day. There must be a way to simply disable all registration. I can't understand why phpBB developers would not have thought of this. It's the best and easiest solution.
I'm not interested in any fix that I've seen or heard of so far where it requires someone who wants to sign up to enter a visual ID number or to answer a question because those are so easy to circumvent it isn't funny. I thought my wildcard filter that disallowed ANY username was brilliant, simple, and did the job perfectly for several months now. So how can someone get around that? And how can I set it so that they never do again?
I hope someone has an answer that works. Thanks in advance!
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I looked through the various solutions posted in this thread, but
none seem to be a solution. In other words,
they don't save me any work. So, a few questions:
1. How was this spammer able to bypass my wildcard disallowed username filter? It's set to disallow ANY username, so there should be no way for him to sign up, right? How did he get past that?
2. How do I completely shut off registration? That's the only workable solution I can see. If I can set it so that nobody can sign up, I never need to even go in and clean up spam accounts or fool around with new mods or software. I just turn it on when I want to sign up a new person and then turn it back off.