China is invading - help me with form field validation

Over the past couple weeks, China has decided to invade my site in full force. I'm sick of deleting registrations, rather I would like to prevent them from happening to begin with.

I know there are numerous ways to do this through blacklists etc, but I feel it would be most effective to add a join form field that requires the members to enter the word "drake".

Can anyone tell me what my php expression in the form check field should look like? I need it to allow either "drake" or "Drake", and not proceed otherwise. Any help with this is greatly appreciated!

 Oh, the irony!

There following you everywhere... LOL

Try this;

Go to admin-->builders-->profile fields  || drag a new item/block up

click on block and add --> System Name  --> Caption --> Description--> select "Text" from drop down

Then click on Advanced tab on top -->Check off mandatory -->Set min value to 1 and max value to 10 (or whatever)

In the "check" field put this; 

return strtolower($arg0) == 'drake';

Click save.. Make new language key for block name

Hope that works for you...

Works beautifully, thank you so much!

I was also getting too many registration from china so i blocked the whole country...........

Just wanted to know how people gonna know that they have to type drake? If I write it on the description then spammers will enter it there.

Read SkyForums reply, it is from Prolaznik. It has cut my spamming 90%!

http://www.boonex.com/forums/?action=goto&my_threads=1#topic/Clean-and-Tweak-My-Site-.htm

Yes but he also has an great idea to shut even more down.

I would say you create a question that only a human can answer like "What color is this page?" Bots won't be able to answer it but a human can.

I made use of this idea. On my site, (it's a racing site), I asked the question "What are we doing this weekend?", the answer of course is racing. In the failed message, I posted the following to help people.

Try again. It's simple! Think about what this site represents, then enter a 6 letter word that starts with an "r" (no caps!)

I think this idea needs to be posted in the tips and tricks forum. Between these two, I really believe you can seriously curtail the spam....

 Implemented this! And there went the other bots..

Just the simple question on the join form "What color is this text?" made it mandatory field.

PERFECT!

well, i am not sure how BOTS work but on my site, they even add avatars. So one would think, its not really a bot right, just some spammer? Anyone having this issue?

You are never going to be able to foil the spammer that does his work manually unless you charge for access. Even then, some will pay to play...

 i wanna strangle them to death. but i could not. they give me daily work and i hate it.. i need a raid idea to remove them all. but i have chatters from china. real chatter so i can't remove china from my prospects.

there is this ISLAND are these sets china too? i need a riffle, is really  crazy

You think it's bad hosting a site with Chinese members, try living there. Little kids get run over in the street and everyone just walks by them without even noticing they are there or rendering assistance.

Some of them just use bots to create a list of Dolphin sites, then a human actually goes back and joins them. I'm guessing these are the ones who add avatars. Different spammers have different skill levels, lol.

on one of my site which reagulary get chinese spammers I simply set "admin needs to approve profiles". Which is also a hessle but still the spammers got a lot less and those ugly profiles are not to be seen by other members.

Some day the Almighty might punish their PCs with a good-will, hopefully LOL

 I did that for a while. It's still a pain as they can still initiate a membership, albeit unconfirmed. It's better to make the join form fail on every attempt as that way, the process never completes and there is no cleanup to do.

I named mine the 'bot_blocker'. So far, I have completely blocked ALL extraneous traffic without losing a single new member to a failed signup. Not bad considering I was dealing with at least 10 every single day before instituting the changes.

 I would like to just say thank! I normally between 20-30 spammers a day. Yes I have tried blocking their whole countries and I have it where they have to confirm their e-mails and stuff like that. but they are persistant! I have tried to have a special word before on the join form but couldnt figure it out. This worked. Since I have done this, I have not had one spammer join! What a relief to wake up to a e-mail that isnt full of new users (spammers) My site is unique so it wasnt hard to put in a common word that all my members would know.

Again, THANK YOU!

Derrick

 Those of you tired of getting so many spammers, this really works!!!

 newton,

this is really great, however, i would never be able to join your site, because i am color-blind (shade deficient)

so in considering all who may come to your site, you are impeding on a handicap that some may have, that has not been addressed?

 the other problem, is that you state its gray, but others who can see the color, might state that its grey? so this particular option, i would have problems with. though others may not?

@Dos, LMAO I'm color blind as well..it looks grey to me..

If you look at picture, I tell you the answer if you click on the "info" icon, "What color is this text? It's Grey"

 ok, well i dont know what gray is, so there is no way for me to know what "looks grey" would be?

 and yeah, ok, so the info icon says what color it is, that would help, if one knew to click on the info icon?

of course i would know that, but others may not :)

lol your right, maybe I spend to much time on some things and miss the spelling.

The gray (symbol: Gy) is the SI unit of absorbed radiation dose of ionizing radiation (for example, X-rays), and is defined as the absorption of one joule of ionizing radiation by onekilogram of matter (usually human tissue).^[1]

I will be changing the spelling.. it still works though. :)

 LOL

hell yeah

although that is a good meaning of how I feel after dealing with all this. lol

well i opted for a mathematical option

what is 5 + 5

then the answer is also in the info, but if somebody were to tell me they didnt know the answer to 5 + 5, then i would suppose they have no business on a computer.

and yes, even i could provide the solution to 5 + 5 =?

LOL

 Thank you.

My site is still in the building process and I already have about 3 "new members" every day... I have no idea how they find out about the site, and what worries me is that they can leave "mandatory" fields empty. I added a 5 + 5 field, so I guess if I still get the same number of spammers it means they are all human.

any idea how to make avatar upload mandatory? this might help stop some of them as well... and changing the name of the join page to something harder to be found - I saw few posts advising to do so, all mentioning the fact that there is a need to make changed to about 7 other files, but I can't find instructions or details in this regard...

 Newton, thanks for showing the screen grab! Made it easy to follow. How do you get the blue 'info blob' I only get a red one when the response is wrong.

Now I know how to do this it will be easy to change as often as I need to do so.

One related question though. Is there any way to disable posting HTML (links) in places like description fields in the photo albums. This seems to be the latest and greatest source of spamlinks on the site. I can't disable HTML globally we allow and encourage it in some places.

Thanks!

Well i tried this: return strtolower($arg0) == 'drake';

And this doesn't work with 7.0.9

plus the description doesn't give a clear idea on exactly what this is supposed to do, it doesn't show anything in the join form so is very confusing when most of you know the software inside out but when the new people like me come along and try to suss it out, its a road block, so if anyone has any further ideas please let myself and others know,

Thank you.

 Not sure what you mean on the info blob. It is there by default, blue, and is red if answered wrong.

We are all fighting the HTML postings in the other places. Maybe a fix in the future.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkuonS-9Rwo

Well the question, "Are you human?" lasted about a month and has been figured out by the spammers. 

I had to change the question to something that you cannot Google and get an answer for. This was not easy to do, Google is very smart as we know.

Here in the new question. Which cannot be answered via Google

What's the word for the sum of five and five?:

Michael

I might add, the few never ending IP's that spam have been hard at the site the past two days to figure it out. I see they are trying to view there old profile page, which has been removed, and re sign up, so far so good.

My question is "What do you call a male duck? Hint: Ryhms with Rake!"

Since this was implemented, I went from multiple spam registrations a day to seeing less than 1 a month. I'm ok with one every once in a while.

your not getting hit hard yet perhaps..

http://bit.ly/KSlUeW

That's the first thing they do, web-search the answer.

My traffic has decreased a bit since implementing it. This is partially due to the seasonal trend of my community and implementing some updated blacklists in apache. 

I also haven't updated beyond 7.0.6, so I'd think it would be more of an issue?

Is there a way of having two answers to the question 'what is 5+5=?

Some members might input '10'

Some members might input 'ten'

 Yes

min length - 2

max length - 3

Check field - return (bool) preg_match('/10|ten/i', $arg0);

 Try this, I didn't test it but it should do the trick...

return (strtolower($arg0) == 'ten' || strtolower($arg0) == '10');

 mathematically speaking when considering an equation such as 

5 + 5 =

if one would put the word ten, then that would theoretically be incorrect. 

if you had five "plus" five "equals"

then i could and would understand somebody writing "ten"

 and you could error trap that by requiring regular expression 0-9

or provide the answer there on the form, because again, the bots are not reading the join form, matter of fact, they are not evening calling the join.php in the browser. 

What am i doing wrong,

  I added the Question in the NEW_Item and renamed it  CITY_ITEM and asked the question  " What city is the System named after " and then put the code in    return (strtolower($arg0) == 'ottawa';    and it looks GREAT but after you click the Join Now button it just sits there at that menu and doesn't do any thing   Dolphon 7.0.9 is my version.

    Does anyone have a small video showing how to do this OR am i missing something small ?

Al

 I did see this one somewhere, 

Question: What is the next whole number after three? (Enter numeric digits)of course the answer would be "4"

Here is a howto video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHueVtx1PLU

If this return (strtolower($arg0) == 'ottawa'; is the actual code you used, then it's in error which would explain the reason it does not load.

Yeah you have an extra "(" in there.. it should be: 

return strtolower($arg0) == 'ottawa';

ok, so, I have gone over every thing shown on this page, but I am still getting the "Check error message" what am I doing wrong?

 Thanks for your Help ( and Deanoo ), Problem solved and board is back to responding...

 Thanks

Al

This suggestion worked 99.9% to rid my site of China Spammers joining. This is such an excellent idea to the one who started this topic. I have gone weeks without them joining. Thank you so much!!!

 What I did was ask what does Salam mean in Arabic. And that worked great!

 That will work for a while; from experience common questions like the ones we used can be "Googled" to get the answer..  http://bit.ly/MFBBMx

https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=5&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=what+does+Salam+mean+in+Arabic

it means "peace" it's the first answer.

The math questions are the same, broken with google search.

 Yes, I realize this. But so far so good... I haven't had to change it yet. Also someone else mentioned that to separate the join pages so you do not get so much spam but I am not sure what he meant. That suggestion came from ummahlinked.com (in case any of you want to ask him)

In the fields builder you can assign 1 or more of the 3 default headings to a different page.

By default dolphin has all join fields on one page. Page 0. But you can change that so some of them on on a second or even a 3'rd page.

That may work for some people, but did not work for me when i recently tried it.

I ask questions on my join form as well, and recently that also has no longer been having the same results.

So i would not count on those working for very long. Lasted a couple of months for me. Now i am getting regular signups from human spammers visiting my site. The bots were not working so they are hitting my site manually now.

Splitting the join form does help a little as well but any determine human spammer will get through anything. If they answer unique manual added questions, captcha, validate email, etc.. then they are determine and will go through split join form as well. Using a unique question with a required answer (changed periodically) will always help keep down spam from bots but those determine human spammers will get what they want but at least it's a little more work for them to join resulting in a lot less spam accounts.

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/spam-spam-spam-spam-IDEA-.htm