My thoughts regarding recent Spam user woes, what do you think?

Question

The best way of getting rid of spam users is allowing only social logins using many providers like:

• Google
• Facebook
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• LinkedIn
• Github

I bet users will have atleast one of the above accounts. If a user is actually serious to their questions resolved, they will use one of the above to sign up on the Q2A site.

What do you guys think?

Captchas are no longer safe and had been compromised long back. Take a look at these links:

• http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/inside-indias-captcha-solving-economy/1835
• http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/
• http://captcha-breaker.gsa-online.de/

I have worked with major consumer portals in the past who employ numerous methods such as IP monitoring, list matching, human intervention, user behaviour in addition to captach to combat spam. I am sure a one man Q2A site owner would definitely not want to do all these.

Answer 1

Yah it sounds good . But are you telling to remove the normal registration process from our site . 

One thing would be much better I think . 

1. Remove the registration form completely 
2. user should register using Social Auth (using https://github.com/alixandru/q2a-open-login )
3. then allow them to update their password (i think this facility is available)
4. then they can login using the username and password or using social auth (obiviously)

for this some how only we should remove the registration form and only display links for social login . With the layer we can simply unset the registration form , I think that would do the task . 

 

Comments

Yes, just restrict the use of the form for registering new users.

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that would be good . :)