BuddyPress.org

Hi all,

As are most of us, I’m continually faced with the nuisance of splog signups. My site has not yet gone public, so I’m not deluged with them at the moment. But I do anticipate a day when my site is so popular (one can dream…) that it attracts the sploggers to what they may perceive as a potential link-stuffing goldmine.

We’re faced with 2 types of sploggers – bots & a**holes (sorry, I mean humans). The stubbornly annoying human sploggers will always be around, and will always have to be dealt with by manually deleting and blocking. The upcoming “Report Spam” features/plugins discussed elsewhere in these forums will hopefully help our users join the fight.

That leaves us to deal with the bots. To prevent the plague, I’ve implemented 3 things which, until recently, have worked flawlessly:
1 – Installed WP-Super-Captcha http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/super-capcha/
2 – Created a membership options page where users are directed when clicking any “Signup” link/button (this page must be visited before the register page).
3 – Changed the name/slug of the register page where users are sent when clicking a “Create a free account” link/button (links to the register page are found only on the membership options page).

The above had effectively stopped the bots dead in their tracks. But there seems to be now something new in the “enemy’s” arsenal. I’m getting the occasional signup where only the Name (core field) is being filled in – out of three required profile fields in my Base Group.

My question then is double-barreled: does anyone have any idea as to how are “they” getting around “required” fields on the register page, and how that can be prevented?