BuddyPress

Over 50% of the traffic to my BP sites are from bots accessing /register when I’ve changed the slug to create-account. This is causing over charges on my hosting. What’s the best way to set up a system where anyone who visits that URL is automatically block by ip?

@modemlooper great idea… I look forward to seeing what the think tank here comes up with.

For the time being I used this in .htaccess. Would like a way to auto ban.

Redirect /register http://www.google.com

Have you checked out any of these?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ttc-user-registration-bot-detector/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ttc-wordpress-security-plugin/

The real issue is bots know the URL because its standard and will not help the hundreds of hits per hour wasting resources. It’s not a matter of blocking sign ups it’s blocking server hits.

And do any of these bots respect and observe robots.txt file? in which case id them from your server stats and block that url although that should be blocked already really.

You could go the Apache Allow/Deny directive in .htaccess?

Need a solution that blocks any ip that reaches URL/register The only visits to this URL are spam bots trying to sign up.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ip-allowed-list/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/restricted-site-access/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tz-host-blocker/

@functionmunchkin nice ones, didn’t notice them before .

@modemlooper Check out this guy’s post regarding a blackhole setup for search bots that don’t respect robots.txt: http://perishablepress.com/press/2010/07/14/blackhole-bad-bots/ Could easily be modified to to do what your talking about regarding the default register slug.