Ultimate Member Spam Registration

[Leonides Suttle]

Thereis a feeling of excitement when you see someone new has joined your membership site. That member has chosen to trust in your offer and become a part of your online community. Now is the time to welcome this new addition to your site and provide them with access to their exclusive content.

There are a few different reasons spam registrations might occur. There are also steps that can be taken to reduce and prevent spam registrations. Filtering out spam registrations will help preserve that genuine pleasant feeling when a legitimate new member registers.

Spam users may also appear in the Manage > Members section of WishList Member that do have a level assigned to the member account. There are additional methods that can be used to reduce and prevent these types of spam registrations.

Adding a reCAPTCHA to a registration form can help prevent spam registrations as it can weed out some non-human sign ups. As an example, if you enable the Require reCAPTCHA option for a level, the reCAPTCHA will be a requirement for anyone trying to register for that level.

The reCAPTCHA Settings popup will appear and you can enter the reCAPTCHA Site Key and reCAPTCHA Secret Key into the corresponding fields and click the Save button. If you don't already have a reCAPTCHA Site Key and reCAPTCHA Secret Key, you will see the provided link within the reCAPTCHA Settings popup to Click here to get one for free.

If automated bots are responsible for the spam registrations, checking out the available security plugin options that include features intended to block out bots can be tried. A plugin like Wordfence is a popular option to consider.

Prevention is very beneficial when it comes to spam member registration. The more spam registrations you can prevent from actually occurring, the less you will need to view or deal with any spam member accounts in your site.

For example, if WooCommerce setting Allow customers to create an account during checkout is checked you might encounter a bot spam issue when using WooCommerce and Woo Subscription add-on. Unchecked the boxes of the Allow customers to create an account during checkout and Allow subscription customers to create an account during checkout under Accounts & Privacy in Account creation to avoid the bot registration.

Block email addresses or entire email domain if spam registrations come from a certain email address or a certain email domain. Use the Blocked email addresses setting on wp-admin > Ultimate Member > Settings > Access > Other. Follow the guide Block Email address on Registration.

Install and configure one of the security plugins, such as Wordfence Security, Sucuri Security, Cerber Security, or similar. Please be careful with the security settings, because too strong rules may block useful functionality.

Ultimate Member is a popular membership plugin for WordPress. It extends standard WordPress login, registration features and add more comprehensive user profile. It is commonly used for creating online community, content restriction and more. It comes with Free and Pro versions for more features.

Ultimate Member already comes with built-in spam protection like a honeypot field, time delay when registering and nonces check. You may still receive spam even with these measures enabled, as they are becoming more and more obsolete.

Ultimate Member supports both reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 (invisible reCaptcha). reCAPTCHA is available in both free and paid versions. Enabling reCAPTCHA is straightforward through the reCAPTCHA plugin settings. It involves creating a Google account, then grabbing Site Key and Secret Key and pasting them into the appropriate fields under Ultimate Member > Settings > Extensions > Google reCAPTCHA. They provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up reCAPTCHA in Ultimate Member registration.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network. It works between your website visitors and your hosting. They deliver your website faster and more securely around the world. They also provide a free way to protect your website from known spammers.

Our WordPress plugin is another way to stop spam on your Ultimate Member registration forms. The plugin works with OOPSpam API that protects over 3.5M websites daily. While the other alternatives above are free, OOPSPam API is a paid service. But it does come with free 40/month spam checks for you to test and see the difference.

All websites eventually get hit by spammers. As a website grows and gets more traffic it attracts more serious spammers with advance bots. Both honeypot and reCAPTCHA will protect your website to a certain degree but they are not enough for targeted spam attacks, manual spam and sophisticated bots. I hope this article helps you find a solution for your spam problem.

I tested signing up with my own email and the email verification works.. I get the verification email in my account and it is only when I click the activation button, then my account is activated. So I am really not sure how or why I am getting spam registrations.. Can someone please help??

Now the problem is i am getting lots of spam registrations. daily more than 20. I controlled comment spams using bad behavior and akismet plugins. But how can i blog spam registrations?.. Any known way to avoid BP spam registration?.

Sadly, the article mentioned (linked) above is not available anymore (I guess the spammers took down that site) and judging by the responses here there still seems to be no known solution to the spammer problem with WPMU/BuddyPress.

@chouf1 On the install I am havong troubles with there is NOT ONE spammer for sure. I know all of them personally! In my other install (I have 0 troubles until now, I will check back on that. thanks for the hint)

4) I ban or limit the registration domains (also in Admin > Site Options) so that the commonly used spammer domains are blocked from registration and then I add an email contact for owners of these addresses to manually request registration. I hide the email address from bots with HiveLogic EnKoder

As there were no sensible options for allowing users to signup but not take blog until a member I simply saw little choice but to remove the section of the form that dealt with the blog signup so I wrapped the fieldset in a conditional that just checked whether I had set a variable to disable or allow thus preventing that section from being returned from the server.

@Michael Removing via CSS is not the same as dealing with it server side. CSS is simply a presentational language which is applied to the DOM, in order to have been able to remove via CSS requires that the elements had been outputed by the server, i.e sent to the browser; the form elements still exist. If grabbing the page using CURL or some similar means you would have that section of the form available.

Wrapping the form section in a php conditional means that as normal the file is passed to the parsing engine to process and compile into the final file to send to the browser, it sees my instruction to ignore that section so simply never includes it in final output.

I do not claim this is the best approach but it works, I do not want users to take a blog initially I would rather it a considered decision once members. Using this approach I have had no further spam blogs (other than real human twits signing up) still get user signups but at least no blogs are created.

Then all you need to do is install SABRE and spammers are gone. This is urgent request because i dont wish to have spoammers on my sites, same goes for everyone else, i m getting hit by 20 spammers per hour.

The occasional stubborn human does drop by once in a blue moon, and these few only manage to get through using RPX and an existing account, or they really take the time to fill out the registration form. Email domain banning and persistent account termination seem to be the only solutions in these cases.

This plugin adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.

reCAPTCHA v3 is an invaluable tool in the fight to stop spam. It serves as a shield, protecting your website from spam and abuse while letting your legitimate users pass through with ease.

Remember: Enabling reCAPTCHA v3 requires you to add your reCAPTCHA site key and secret key on the Paid Memberships Pro settings page. This will activate reCAPTCHA on your membership checkout page, safeguarding your site from potential spam threats.

Paid Memberships Pro features a dedicated spam protection setting in the Advanced Settings tab. By enabling this setting, you create an additional layer of security, making it even harder for spam to infiltrate your site.

Paid Memberships Pro also provides a simple, yet effective method to stop spam checkouts in the Users section in the WordPress admin dashboard. If Paid Memberships Pro detects spam-like activity, a new filter titled Potential Spam Checkouts will appear here.

The Email Confirmation Add On for Paid Memberships Pro adds a validation link to the membership confirmation email sent to members when signing up for selected levels on your site. This is a great option for stopping spam accounts.

When a new user registers on your site, they are required to confirm their email address before they can access your content. This prevents bots and spammers from signing up with fake emails and helps to ensure that only legitimate users can gain access to your site.

The Approval Process for Membership Add On for Paid Memberships Pro creates an extra layer of manual review to your membership process. Admins can manually approve or deny new members, providing further protection against spam and fake registrations.

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