Yes to the first, no to the 2nd — to be direct, not sure you’re following…
You just gave steps for overall spam reduction (which, thank you), what I’m referring to is a problem that occurred from the custom registration page. I’m talking in the matter of an hour I went from no spam to lots of spam because of the custom registration page which code I gave above. What would cause that and how can I fix it?
Why would this custom page cause the issues and why would the Honeypot plugin you gave not fix it or my old code — it’s doing the same thing I had before that worked perfectly? I could remove the custom registration page and the spam would stop, but I rather keep it though since I don’t want the default registration page.
Hm, so I added that plugin first to see if that would do anything. The spam requests are still very high (user spam sign-ups). Again, I’m just comparing this to before I did the new custom registration page – the code I put above in codeshare.io.
Nevermind, found out from researching more on WordPress databases that for these pending accounts you should go into “wp_signups” database (they’re stored in 2 places). Then with phpmyadmin I am searching that table and deleting anyone using spammy emails.