How do I prevent mass-signups?

[SkuZZy]

It has come to my attention that there are people who can mass-flood message boards by signing up over and over and over (talk about a nightmare). It wouldn't be too hard to create a php script that would do this and keep looping moving up in numbers signing up on the forums (IE: skuzzy1, skuzzy, skuzzy3, ect.). But... i'm not here to ask how to make this script, i'm here to ask how to prevent against it. Is there some sort of hack that would limit new user sign ups to, say, 1 per minute? I think this should be intergrated into vB 3.0 too...

thanks,
adam

[ccd1]

A way to prevent this is to disallow using free email accounts (limiting it to ISP provided accounts).

[Jake Bunce]

if you are using e-mail verification you can block free e-mails (like baragon said). this thread contains a list of free e-mail domains - http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...threadid=25009

[SkuZZy]

eh

Even with blocked free emails, someone could still use fake email addresses just to fill up the database... they dont need to verifiy their account for it to be created. Someone could just use "[email protected], [email protected]" all the way up to 999999. What i'm looking for is a hack that will limit sign ups to once per minute, so if ANYONE tries to sign up an account and someone else already has signed one up in the last 59 seconds, it will tell them something like "Our forums only allow one sign up per 60 seconds. Unfortunately, someone else signed up XX(timesince) seconds ago. Please try again in XX(timeleft) seconds. Thank you.

[Jake Bunce]

hacks requests belong on www.vbulletin.org

you could also try banning the person's IP(s)

[SkuZZy]

heh

You should see my banned list in .htaccess. I've banned so many proxies that DOS my server that it's not even funny anymore. As far as hack requests, i'm done with them. Last time I requested one it got 4 views in 48 hours (and 2 of those views were mine). Waste of my time to even post @ vb.org.

Thanks for the help. Perhaps this feature could be integrated into vb3? There is a feature to prevent post-flooding, so why not one to prevent registration-flooding. Do you know how much chaos someone could cause by signing up a few thousand accounts in a couple of hours?

SkuZZy