Problem with mass account creation spam

[johnboyman]

Hello. Someone is spamming accounts on my site. I have set the in the User Registration options to have an email sent to me when an account is created and also a verification emails is sent to a user when they create an account. These spam accounts have false email addresses that means they just mass produce garbage accounts without verifying them. I know you can test email addresses to see if they are real. Can vBulletin check to see if an email address is real before creating them an account? If not is there a plugin to do this? thanks

[Mark.B]

You can't check email addresses are valud but you can enable anti-spam measures, such as ReCaptcha or Q&A.

[OrganForum]

I allow new users 30 days to validate their account and delete them after that. I also check the join date of Moderated users against their latest activity date. If after 30 days their last activity date remains the same as their join date, I delete them as well. Sometimes spammers and hackers will establish zombie accounts that they resurrect later. If a user joins and doesn't return for thirty days, there's no point to risking having them as members of your forum.

[johnboyman]

Yes good idea. I also checked out the prune/ move users. I realized I can tell everyone on my forum to make an introduction within like a week of signing up and activating their account. Then to clear out garbage accounts with phony emails I can say remove any accounts made past 1 week ago that have < 1 post.

[OrganForum]

Keep in mind that many people may legitimately join your forum and never post in order to take advantage of subscriptions, private messages, and any members only features and areas.

[Carrfixr]

I give 5 days for them to confirm. After that they'll get deleted. If they have a problem with that then they can use the contact us form. If I see they keep signing on without confirming I delete those quicker

[Wayne Luke]

Make sure you're using Recaptchav2 (Settings -> Human Verification Manager) and StopForumSpam (Settings -> Spam Managemnent) set up.