allow yahoo, gmail , hotmail

[sivaganeshk]

How to allow only these widely used email accounts?

I know how to restrict few domain. But I need to know how to allow only few domains

[35mm]

Just curious as to why you want want to do that? It wont block spammers, but it will block loads of genuine people!

[sivaganeshk]

I am having a problem in Spam-o-matic (akismet ) mod and disabled it.

After that, I getting tons of Spammers(or Spam bots). Nearly 95% of them use only custom domain email.

Also, I am targeting people, who rarely has custom domained email.

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Anyone have solution to this ?

I facing over 30 new spam account when ever I login to my ACP.

Please help !!

[cellarius]

Just to get this straight: to prevent spam you want to allow only mail providers who are known to be used by lots of spammers? Really?

[sivaganeshk]

I din get u...
I target on College students. Do you think many students will have email like mail@myname.com ??

[cellarius]

That does not matter for my argumentation. I'm telling you that if you want to fight spam it does not make sense to allow only email providers that are known to be used by spammers.

[sivaganeshk]

Hmm.. But it still helps to certain extend . right?

[HMBeaty]

Hmm.. But it still helps to certain extend . right?
No, not really. You'd be doing more harm than good by blocking those domains

[35mm]

Hmm.. But it still helps to certain extend . right?

You may find a lot of students using educatipnal email addresses!

There is a solution. I used it a while ago on one of my vb forums that was getting hit by over 1000 spammers per day which was driving my moderators mad!

First off go to http://www.stopforumspam.com/ and register for thier API - it's free. You will need to make a little script to go in your register.php to query the API and interupt the registration process. If you can't do this your self, PM me and I may be able to help.

When I set this up on my site the daily spammer registrations went down from about 1000 to about 2! I set mine up to log every registration blocked and every registration passed so that I could monitor it and look for any pitfalls - there were none.

How it works is that when someone submits the registration form on your site you use the API to check the SFS database and it returns a score for user name, email address and IP. The score represents how many times that item has been reported for spamming forums. As user names can be used by more than one person, I put little priority on that score, but the email and IP scores are the important ones. So if either of these have a score > 1 you can interupt the registration process and just redirect the spammer where ever you like before they have a chance to become registered on your forum.

This system has been running on one of my sites now for about 9 months. We have 180,000 members and no spam for our moderators to waste their time on.

[preemz10314]

You dont ever want to only allow certain emails. many people have numerous emails these days.

If you want to fight spam, disable the stop forum spam mod, and enable the human verification manager in admincp>settings and create a question. This will 99.9% stop spam. (The human spammer may get thru but the bots will not, and the human spam is easily dealt with)

The human verification manager is a much better easy to use tool then any stop spam mod around. *I have no bad thoughts for those mods, but there is little need for them when using the human verification manager.

[Videx]

Remember also that you can look up the domains these spammers are coming from and block those on your server (e.g. with cpanel). But again, blocking entire domains like this may not be a good idea.

[35mm]

If you want to fight spam, disable the stop forum spam mod, and enable the human verification manager in admincp>settings and create a question. This will 99.9% stop spam. (The human spammer may get thru but the bots will not, and the human spam is easily dealt with)

The human verification manager is a much better easy to use tool then any stop spam mod around. *I have no bad thoughts for those mods, but there is little need for them when using the human verification manager.
Human verification of any kind didn't help us. A lot of the spammers were hand submitting. SFS knocked em all dead - so disabling it would be madness!

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Remember also that you can look up the domains these spammers are coming from and block those on your server (e.g. with cpanel). But again, blocking entire domains like this may not be a good idea.

Blocking IPs and domains if you are being spammed big time, would be a time consuming and endless task, but you are right - only allowing free email addresses would be mad also.

[cellarius]

Human verification of any kind didn't help us. A lot of the spammers were hand submitting.
So what would keep those human spammers from getting one, ten or a hundred yahoo accounts?

[35mm]

So what would keep those human spammers from getting one, ten or a hundred yahoo accounts?They do! And they get picked up pretty quick on SFS. So no point only allowing yahoo, hotmail etc!

[sivaganeshk]

Q & A Human verification is awesome.. The first day w/o any spam accounts !! :D

[HMBeaty]

Q & A Human verification is awesome.. The first day w/o any spam accounts !! :D
If that's the only thing you're using now, make sure you have at least 5 different Q&A's. Also, make sure the answer isn't super simple, for example "2 + 2 = ?"