For some time I have been having problems with registered users. Not the dozen or so users that I know about who either contribute to the site or are left over from the days when I insisted on registration before commenting. No, these are ones where “people” have found the registration page, created a profile but I have never heard from them since. I have been looking for a way to clear them out, which is not easy because I have no way to tell if they have actually commented using that profile and if I delete those, then the comments disappear with them. I have been looking around for a plugin to help and in the mean time I have been deleting ones with email addresses in Russia, Bulgaria and Poland\u2014it is not xenophobia, just that I know that there is a 99% chance that they are spammers.<\/p>\n
One possible plugin that I have tried is loginlogger<\/a>. This keeps a track of when people have logged in. I was hoping it did a bit more but even that has been fascinating. Apart from my own connection, which I know about, I had well over 100 failed logins over a 2 hour period last night, and the usernames were quite repetitive; brutal2008, Reiki, kazikr, broker1980, watroba50, smiglidigli, bombastik2008, etc. occur quite often. These names don’t appear in my roster (but they may have once and I have deleted them, I don’t keep track) but doing a Google search on them reveals a common pattern; most hits are either on SEO<\/acronym> sites or are Polish or Russian sites or in those languages.<\/p>\n So my policy seems to be justified\u2014that is where the spammers are. To avoid the problem in the future I could have disabled registration altogether. It isn’t used a lot, but I like to give regular commenters the option of having their profile stored if they want to. So what I have done is install the Sabre plugin<\/a>. This is a very flexible registration control system with options for Capcha, arithmetic tests, email confirmation and other validation tecniques. I am hoping that with minimal effort I can foil the majority of automatic bot registrations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For some time I have been having problems with registered users. Not the dozen or so users that I know about who either contribute to the site or are left over from the days when I insisted on registration before commenting. No, these are ones where “people” have found the registration page, created a profile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","category-technical","category-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1875,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/1875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}