Registration Admission - Honeypot

There seems to be a large number of spambot registrations making it through XenForo's default methods. So, I've added a honeypot (it's non-intrusive). It should significantly reduce the number of spam registrations we get.

Have we gotten any real registrations? The couple of times I went in there, they were all obvious spambots from China and Khazikstan.

I've rejected 20 spam registrations today. 15 yesterday. A number of them have gotten through, too. Spam registrations were something I tackled back on my own board, and I've got it down to a science. I hate spam registrations.

I installed the honeypot because XenForo's option (an Add-on) ranged anywhere from $15 to $39.00. All it does is exactly what I just did for free.

Got this all the time on the old board. Sometimes over a hundred a day.

Yeah, they're persistent little bastards.

At it's worst, about 1000 a day until O2C had done something to really cut back on the problem.

I did a hell of a lot of looking people up back then. I do not miss it one bit.

I've never had that kind of volume and I hate weeding them out. My litmus test was generally if they had some kind of coherent name and there was some kind of link between the name and the e-mail address. "Dweplefez" gets summarily deleted. As does "Anne Johnson313" with the e-mail address "larry@spambog.ru".

Yeah, but Dweplefez's legit!!1! He's from Mryfflestan and wants to sell us his shoes.

Hehe, the thing I did to cut down on it was to have a minimum registration duration - that is, if you spent less time than a human would on the registration page (a minimum of 14 or 23 seconds, IIRC), your registration would appear to be processed but then be silently dropped on the floor. Didn't prevent manual spammer registration, but it did eliminate the bots.

I know what a honeypot is in general, but what is it in this context?

In this context, the linkbacks to the honeypot server are drawing away the spambots before we even have to deal with them. I embedded the linkbacks into every page of every template, and especially on the user registration page. Coupled with the API key that I added (Good on XenForo for making it easy to apply one!), it's like the spambots can't click the decoy links fast enough. So far it seems to be working, as we've gone from 30-40+ manual registration approvals a day, to less than 10. In short, the flies are being drawn away from the food.

Ready for releasing?