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Fighting registration spam with a honey pot

Chad Butler · Aug 3, 2013 ·

I’ve had a few requests for help with combating registration spam using the plugin. To be honest, I’m right there with you all – I was getting a great deal of registration spam here on the site. I’ve been working on how to reduce that with a number of approaches.

One approach is the Security extension which has settings to set up black lists. But blocking IP addresses needs to be done with caution. Many spammers are not spamming from their own machines. Some of it comes from innocent victims with compromised systems.

Another possible solution that can work well is to use what is known as a “honey pot.” This is essentially a trap that the spam bot puts its hand into and is trapped. That is the method I will describe here.

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Add a first name greeting to the new registration email

Chad Butler · Aug 2, 2013 ·

As much as I try to make the plugin as flexible as possible with a framework that includes lots of hooks for customization, every once in awhile a question pops up that forces me to think outside the box, so to speak. Case in point, I recently received a question in the forum about putting a first name greeting into the body of the welcome email that goes to a user upon new registration. Seemingly intuitive and simple, that particular field is not readily available to the email function. BUT… have no fear, there is a very simple customization that makes it (and other fields) available to the email filter. Continue Reading →

Email users when a new post is published – opt-in/opt-out version

Chad Butler · Jun 9, 2013 ·

This code snippet is an extension of the email users when a new post is published snippet. Like that snippet, this one comes from user requests.

The difference here is that we will only email users who have requested specifically to be notified of new posts, and we’ll allow them to opt-out of that process at a later date by updating their profile. Continue Reading →

Email Admin When a User Updates Registration Data

Chad Butler · Apr 26, 2013 ·

Here’s a request I get from time to time – how can the admin receive email notification that a user updated their data, so I figured it is about time to put that together as a tutorial.

This one should be fairly straight forward and can be used cut-and-paste for the general features. As usual, I’ve tried to comment the code so that you know what is happening where and more advanced users can build on this concept from there. Continue Reading →

Validate a registration with a PIN

Chad Butler · Apr 16, 2013 ·

Here is a script idea you can use to validate a stored value that you might have for users (such as a PIN) against their registration data. This example will assume that you only want to allow certain registrations for people who you already have data on (in this example, their name) and you want to validate that the user registering is that person. This example will use PIN assigned to the user’s data that we have and the script will validate the PIN provided at registration or will halt registration. Continue Reading →