Ban all gmail "multiple dot" users

[Mick]

have added a couple of questions to my Q&As

As has already been said, use only one Q&A, if you have more than one and one gets beaten you won’t know which one it was and you’ll have to change all of them.

they are of the type "what colour”

Bots know all the colours and will guess them eventually.

[HB]

I'm a fan of the Sortables Captcha. But I was curious if there were any "gmail dupes" in my forum, so I wrote this script:

Code: Select all

<?php

// standard hack prevent
define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = (defined('PHPBB_ROOT_PATH')) ? PHPBB_ROOT_PATH : './';
$phpEx = substr(strrchr(__FILE__, '.'), 1);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.'.$phpEx); 

global $db, $auth, $user, $auth;

// Start session management
$user->session_begin();
$auth->acl($user->data);
$user->setup();

$sql = "SELECT username, user_id, user_email, user_posts FROM " . USERS_TABLE . " WHERE user_email LIKE '%gmail.com'";
$result = $db->sql_query($sql);
$rows = $db->sql_fetchrowset($result);
$db->sql_freeresult($result);

$gmails = array();
foreach ($rows as $row) {
    $gmail = str_replace('gmail.com', '', $row['user_email']);
    $gmail = str_replace('.', '', $gmail);
    
    if (array_key_exists($gmail, $gmails)) {
        $gmails[$gmail][] = $row;
    } else {
        $gmails[$gmail] = array($row);
    }
}

foreach ($gmails as $gmail => $dupes) {
    if (count($dupes) > 1) {
        foreach ($dupes as $row) {
            echo "Found duplicate ${row['user_email']} for user ${row['username']} (${row['user_id']}) posts: ${row['user_posts']} <br>";
        }
        echo "<br>";
    }
}

?>

There were 5 matches out of ~34K members. All of them appeared to be innocent cases of someone forgetting their login and creating a new one.

[vatreni]

Interesting, thanks

Following Mick's advice I have reduced to 1 Q&A and still no spam sign ups