restricting free email signups
 

Is there a way to restrict people from signing up with free email accounts such as hotmail and yahoo? Problem is when we ban people, they just sign up for a new free hotmail account and then a new username on my board.

Thanks!

Just go to Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Banning Options -> Ban Email

And add the email domains next to each other separated by a space.

If you want a large list of free email domains to ban, click on the link in my sig - it's already formatted for vB.

Thanks

does that affect current members with free email accounts or just ones that sign up after this hack is installed?

There is an option under the banned email list whether or not you want it to affect current members.

ok thats cool.

are you talking about this:

Allow user to keep banned email
If you ban an email address and a user already uses that address, a problem will occur. Using this option, you can specify whether the user will have to enter a new email address in their profile when they next modify their email address, or whether the user can just keep the email address which you have banned.

This always had me a little confused. so what you are saying is, if I choose to ban hotmail accounts, and I have this function set at Yes then current Hotmail members can keep their hotmail email, but new users cant?

Yes.

thanks for the info Steve :)

Just curious what you guys thought as to the ethics of doing this. I mean sure it does greatly cut down on spammers and people signing up just to screw with you, but...

Well, for example my board currently has 437 members. I ran the stats today and saw that 136 people right now are using hotmail, 77 more are using yahoo. That's about half of my entire userbase just on those two e-mail providers. If I now ban those, wouldn't that kind of tick a lot of people off even though I do allow current users to keep those addresses?

What are your thoughts?

It depends on the nature of your forum and userbase. Mine is a community oriented High School Sports site and the reason I did it was to make people somewhat accountable for their posts because I have to answer to school administrators, parents, coaches, etc... and they all know me by name and face. Everyone has access to a non-free email account and most people choose to signup with their free account to keep their anonymity. If you were to implement this as I have, the account signups do not really drop off, they just signup with their local email address and that's it. I have only heard a few complaints and I usually work with them to get them signed up!

That's a good point. I did make it clear in my announcement about disallowing them that I was doing it for the benefit of the community, and not to step on anyone's toes at all.

I guess we'll see what the feedback is.

I don't allow free email accounts on my site, not worth the headaches.

Same here, Smoothie.