Blog Engage goes invite only

[bbrian017]

If you haven't heard I decided to close down our registrations and more to an invitation system only.

I had no other way to stop the spam bloggers from joining and submitting their crappy content. I'm serious it's really bad and our members were complaining.

All members have the ability to send invitations. I have a contact me form for anyone that wants to request an invitation from me personally. (on the register page)

What's your thoughts on the decision.

Do you think this will create a more positive feel and increase the demand for memberships?

Worst case scenario I simply open registrations again.

[artlibs]

You have to do what you have to do to stop spam bots from ruining your site. It might not be the most effective way for people looking for a quick sign up to do, but it makes your site more mysterious perhaps?

Spammers suck!

[bbrian017]

Spammers are so active now I'm sure you can even get a college or university degree in spam lol.

This will only stop them for a little bit until they find the new sign up url lol. But I will just change it again.

Thanks for the input and comment/

[artlibs]

No problem! Spamming is such an issue. Gah... like scalpers. Hahaha...

[Jessemn]

Originally Posted by bbrian017

This will only stop them for a little bit until they find the new sign up url

To truly close the registration and fight back you should go a little further than just hiding the registration page. After all, nothing is ever truly hidden on the internet. All a skilled spammer needs is one good account, and he can email himself the registration page - no matter how often you change it, all he has to do is email himself again. As it is now, as soon as I have the registration page, I can just go to town.

I'm not convinced this will work in the long run, it's just too easy to hack.

An alternate method would be to create an encrypted, unique key for each sent invitation (ie. register.php?key=12345abcde). This way you can track where the invitations are coming from as well as how many new accounts are being created with these keys. Then you can crack down on whoever is sending out invitations to worthless spammers - finally solving the issue.

And there are many other security issues you can add to this making it even more effective.

I'm interested to see how this works out for you. I've personally been fooling around with a few anti-spam measures, trying to figure out the best model. Keep me posted.

[bbrian017]

Actually I can track using IP address and I also get to see who invites who! So if person A invites 5 spammers in a row well his account woudl also be deleted naturally.

[liquidgraph]

Are you finding the problem is with automated spam (bots) or individuals? Are captchas and things like that not helping?

[bbrian017]

Recaptcha is being passed some how. Spam Registrations and e-mail confirmation.

These guys are professional.

This has stopped spam accounts 100%

[The Source]

On our site we stopped 90% of spam registration and email via the contact page by just blocking China and Turkish IP's.

Really took a load off the server as well. Try that, promise it will do wonders. Even with your current security questions they are still going to try and get access.

[bbrian017]

For now I don't think I will ban IP's I imagine there are some members that are using our service from them locations.

The invite only system is working fine.