Question

Is there a way to moderate subscription requests?

I'd like to get an email saying, "SusanQ" wants to join the wiki, please reply to this email to enable her account.

My problem is that I'm getting several bogus accounts per week. They always have a link to either 1) a Chinese business unrelated to my wiki, or 2) a plausible looking facade of a web page that has lots of embedded porn links.

In both cases, the people are only subscribing to get their links into Google so they rate higher on a search. I'm currently killing these things by hand by ssh'ing into my server and deleting all the associate UserName.txt files.

I'd like an up-front way of stopping frivolous logins. I'm currently at something like a 10:1 ratio of bad/valid accounts.

Environment

-- RickWalker - 08 Dec 2005

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

I highly recommend to install the latest BlackListPlugin. We had the same problem on TWiki.org, it went away a few weeks ago after upgrading the Plugin.

As it turns out those registrations are scripted, e.g. the registration form on your site is not used. TWiki.org gets failed attempts every day, here are a few lines from the log file:

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Dec 2005

Thank you, Peter. I've installed the Plug-in. Sorry I didn't find it on my own. This looks like it will greatly reduce these cookie-cutter parasitic subscriptions. -RickWalker

-- RickWalker - 09 Dec 2005