Stopping trolls by banning hotmail, etc.
 

Past couple of days we have had heavy amounts of trolls sign up using yahoo, hotmail, lycos, etc. Is there a list of free e-mail accounts and a hack that will disable them from using these accounts?

Do A search on vb.com

I tried to post my banned free e-mail list and received the following. :)

1. The text that you have entered is too long (184875 characters). Please shorten it to 50000 characters long.

Syl...

Try the link in my sig.

2 points:

1- It is impossible to ban them all because of services like everyone.net. By using such services every domain owner can turn his domain to a free email provider for free so it is impossible to track them all.

2- It is not a very good idea to have a very long banned list in vb options because all these options are assigned to a variable individually in every call for a vbulletin page. And if your banned email list is say "50000" chars, it means that one of your variable will have a size of 50 Kb. and it takes that much space in the server, everytime global.php is called. Improper use of server resources..

I don't know how vb3 is handling this but I think it would be much performance friendly to save such options in a seperate place and call them only when they are needed (ie in register page and in user email change page).

So does anyone use this e-mail ban list? Does it really bog the server down a lot? I am sort of lost on how to stop trolls.

another way to stop the trollers is to moderate new users for a certain time period. If they don't see their post go right up, they go away pretty quick and it's fairly painless for your regulars.

I used that list of 34,000 email domain for over a year. I don't use it at the moment, but I did in the past.

I'm using it now. I'll let you know how it goes.