[Plugin: SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam] SI Captcha Doing Nothign To Prevent Registration Spam

I’m having the same problem Jill. I think the spambots have broken Captcha.

John

I have never confirmed a case like this, but would like to.

If you can allow me temporary admin account to investigate, please contact me from my contact form.

https://www.642weather.com/weather/contact_us.php

Mike Challis

I just wrote you back Mike.

Same issue here. Let me know if you need another example/temp admin account.

Is there anything in common among the spams to indicate your site is targeted by one spammer rather than random spammers?
Such as.. do they all come from the same IP address?
Do they use the same email address domain?
Are they spamming the same type of spam?

There are captcha farm services that use real humans to manually enter the spam. The labor is ridiculously cheap.
https://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/

I wonder if this is how they are doing it?

I’m dumb – bbPress integration means users could register on the forums which don’t use captcha, and thus they would be registered on the main wordpress website as well.

reCaptcha plugin installed and problem solved (I hope).

For those still diagnosing… Do you have any way to look at IP addresses of the spammers? Maybe find them in the server logs. Are they coming from the same IP?
Then you can use my IP To Country Lookup
https://www.642weather.com/weather/ip-to-country.php

Also look at the server logs at the timestamps and see how fast they are registering to see if it could be automated.
Or do they register minutes apart like they might be manually entered.

Mike

It seems to me that Si Captcha and ReCaptcha have been broken. I am going to have to make it much harder to join my site. I am going back to a Contact Form 7 set up.

Since I set up BuddyPress my site has become one giant Spambot target. I haven’t gotten any anti spam trick to work. This is very discouraging.

John

Maybe somebody is manually entering the spam. Like from the captcha farm services.

What does the contact form 7 do to prevent register spam?

Contact Form 7 simply lets you ask the user a question that they must answer correctly.

John

I just installed this a few days ago on wpmu/buddypress install, and yes it’s not preventing spam user registrations. Perhaps the captcha is too weak.

Reports of this are rare, never had it happen on my servers.

The captcha is not too weak. You may be targeted with human spammers.
There are captcha farm services that use real humans to manually enter the spam. The labor is ridiculously cheap.
https://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/

Also I recommend using Akismet at the same time.

Mike