Robots skirting registration

There's no way there getting through JFBConnect, or at least, not that we know of. Our registration flow requires that the user trying to create an account through us logged into Facebook already and has approved your application. Also, only one FB user can create an account, so unless they have mass fake FB accounts, that's not the problem.

What I would highly, highly, highly recommend, and what we use on this site, is Cedit Registration Validator ( JED link ). We use version 2 (like $20), but version 1 is free. No clue what the difference is.

Our site has at least 200 bogus registration attempts daily (we have a public forum, and are a decent size site), and Cedit catches almost all of them. It uses tools like Project Honeypot, StopForumSpam, Spamhaus, and some others to check the user's IP and email during the registration process and will block the attempt if its listed on any of those sites.

It's better than captcha or other means that can be automated. We actually removed captcha from our standard Joomla reg process about 6 months ago because it didn't do much and the plugin above closed the gap.

The only thing you'll need to look into is that the validator works with all your different registration extensions. It definitely does with Joomla. It doesn't with JFBConnect, which as mentioned above should be fine (it is on this site). I believe it works with JomSocial and not sure about AEC.

Anyways, hope that helps.. I haaaaattteee spammers, and it's a constant task staying vigil.

Alex

Didn't know that about the free version, but it's well worth the $20.. trust me. We have the following settings, in case your curious:
Blacklisting of the following domains: .163.com, .21cn.com, .sohu.com, .tom.com, .yeah.net
Habitual spammers or worse. Nothing good ever comes from those domains, we've found, but your experiences may vary.

We use the following services:
Stopforumspam (reject any match)
Project Honeypot
Validate Email Domain
Spamhaus

No other settings are enabled. That config really works well for us. The Advanced tab lets you setup logging of passes/failures, so that's a good way to check how things are going.

Anyways, really hope that gets you going, and good luck!
Alex

Yes, we're still running Joomla 1.5. 1.6/1.7 doesn't offer anything that we need right now, but I'm sure over the course of 2012 we'll be updating to 2.5 (the release coming out in a few weeks that is the successor to 1.7).

That sucks about the validator not working in 1.7. I did find the JED link for the pro version ( here ). It does state 1.6 only, but I honestly haven't heard of many extensions not working in 1.7 when they worked in 1.6. I'd definitely contact support as their reviews seem to indicate that support is pretty good.. though there's not too many reviews. If not, you can hopefully get your money back.

Not to put you on a JED hunt, but I did a search there for stopforumspam (the service that works great for us through the Reg Validator plugin) and found only one other extension that states 1.7 support:
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-...ty/site-access/14027
Never used it, and not sure how it would integrate with JomSocial/AEC, but possibly worth looking into.

Good luck,
Alex