Stop WordPress User Registration Spam!

ByMike Matera

Quick post for today. I just want to alert you to a great WordPress plugin I discovered, a plugin that sharply reduces the number of bogus user registrations.

If you’ve had a WordPress site for more than a few months, you’ve no doubt been the recipient of spam comments. And, usually, CAPTCHA plugins help with that. But what do you do about fake user registrations?

I was having tons of such registrations on one of the sites I manage. Apparently, someone decided to attack that site, first with spam comments. When I subsequently required all commenters to register (because CAPTCHA hadn’t been working), the spammer(s) struck back by creating scores of fake user registrations – every day.

This went on and on and on until, finally, I discovered the Stop Spammers WordPress plugin. I strongly recommend that you install and activate it if you want to cut down the fake user registrations. What it does is record IP addresses and time intervals surrounding user registrations. If more than two in a row come from the same IP address within a short time span, the spammer is blocked.

I’ll keep you posted on whether it continues to work. It’s been a mere 24 hours, and yet 74 potential spam registrations have been blocked. Nice!

Here’s the link to the plugin again:

Stop Spammers WordPress Plugin

UPDATE: September 16, 2013 – It’s been five months, and this plugin is doing a very good job. A trickle of fake user registrations still gets through, but as of 1:25pm Eastern Daylight Time today, 6242 fake registrations have been blocked since I started using this plugin back in April. Every now and then I have to delete a handful of bogus registrations, but the number is NOTHING like what it had been before I implemented the Stop Spammers WordPress Plugin. Definitely use this if you’re having issues with spam users.

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