This is the second time this has happened, I’ve just had 41 phony registrations on my site just so they could list their dodgy web sites in their members URL.

They must have automated this or found a back-way through pM’s registration procedure, bypassing the web browser. I can’t see these spam monkeys doing all this by hand. They would first need to register, reply to the registration email, navigate to the “Your Profile Page”, enter their crappy URL and hit update.

Any tips from anyone experiencing the same thing? I’ve deleted them and banned their IP. Still waiting for the Membership Approval option in pM.

There is a small hack you can do to implement a “membership approval” feature.  See this thread.  (Note that it’s pretty old, so the specific line numbers have likely changed, but the general approach should still work.)

pMachine’s registration system does have a few anti-spam features, but it’s not comprehensive.

If spam protection is a really high priority for you then you might want to investigate ExpressionEngine since it has much more comprehensive spam protection.  Of course, it would probably be a bit extreme to just upgrade to EE for that one reason.  There are lots of other advantages to EE, though, so you can determine for yourself.

Chris,

I read the “membership approval” hack thread - it’s just that it had been mentioned a previous thread by Rick that this was planned for the 2.3 release. Is it the pM’s teams intention to still add something similar?

EE isn’t really an option for me just for this. I’ve too much time and effort invested in my new site to want to redo it for EE.

Just going back to my original post - how did the spammers manage to register 41 separate times, confirm the registrations and then edit their profiles to add their URLs? Have they found a back way through the pM registration process? I can’t see them doing this all by hand.

Pretty much anything you can do via a web browser can be mimicked using scripts, and that includes member registrations and checking/sending email.  Usually the best way to prevent this kind of thing is to make it harder for spammers by blocking IP addresses (you can see the IP addresses for a member in the CP when viewing that member’s information), require email confirmation, changing the location of your registration script, and a few other things.  Nothing is fool proof though, not even requiring an image captcha since a spammer can find ways around that too. 

Hi - I have a member ( intruder) that has entered his url and a phony email address but no name…. so this means that i can’t find a way of deleting this *@#$*@#$ entry   Viewing the member’s information yields this:

how where can i find this entry to delete it? many thx to all for your help
ciao

Do you have access to something like phpMyAdmin?

i have root access to the files on the server…will this help?

Perhaps.  Just want something else that can view the database information direct from MySQL.  In the Control Panel, do you see the rest of the information and just not the Name?  If so, can you look in the HTML code and try to find out if there is anything in there like  ?

Hi Paul - this is what i see:

div class=“smlink”><nobr><a href=“index.php?sx=&m=members&p=edit&id=5&show=edit” ><b></a></b></div></td>
“smlink”><nobr><a href=“index.php?sx=&m=post_office&p=email_member&to=ueukm04@mail.ru”><b>::</a>  <a href=“mailto:ueukm04@mail.ru”><b>ueukm04@mail.ru</a></b></div></td>
div class=“smlink”><nobr><a href=“http://www.ponzanoveneto.com/members/sitelaunch.php?go=http://allkinddating.com” target=“blank”><b>Site</b></a></div></td>
div class=“smlink”><nobr><b>0</b>  <a href=“index.php?sx=&m=weblog&p=editview&author=5&show=0”><b>View…<b></a></div></td>
div class=“smlink”><nobr><b>0</b>  <a href=“index.php?sx=&m=weblog&p=show_comment&id=5&f=ind”><b>View…</a></div>

..PS yes the name field is blank so one can’t “link” to it as per other enteries..

OK, that’s odd.  There is a check in there to make sure the signature for a user is not blank.  So, I wonder how they are pulling this off.  Hmmm…I think I would like to have you download phpMyAdmin and see if there is any data in the database at all.  If you send me an email, I can help with this tomorrow.

Paul - i had myphp admin..just didn’t use it before . i found this:

   
   
   
   
   
1099014453
0 0
0 3
66.199.238.21
    With selected:    

OK, well, you should be able to delete that member account then.  I am investigating ways a blank character could get in there, but I think I do have some code to prevent this from happening again by requiring at least one latin character in each signature.

...yeah i noticed the delete function ... so will go ahead and delete it. wanted to make sure there wasn’t something there that you might need.

many thx paul and good night…

I’m having the same thing happen at my Everquest Guild site (www.royalorderofnorrath.com). Once a day I’m having to go in through MySQL and delete them. I would love to see the hack that would require the latin character. *pathetic begging look*

I’m having the same problem registrations that have a blank name and a mail.ru email address.  Can I just delete the registration record using phpmyadmin?

I’m fine with this as a short-term fix, but we need a better fix than this or upgrading to EE, which with a site like mine will take weeks, if not months.

It seems that the addition to require a latin character is not working, since giovanni got hit twice more yesterday.  To be honest, I am a bit stumped out it is getting past that check, so I am going to do more research this weekend into the problem.  In the mean time, you can delete via phpMyAdmin.

just to let you know. the intruder is now able to mass register 6-8 times a day. no sooner do i delete his entries that he is back at it. i’ll give him credit for persistence

but lets Snuff him out!

Is it all the same email address or at least the same domain in the email address?