Question about banning e-mail addresses

[Chakrava]

I've been looking at lots of solutions to deal with all the recent bot problems. Fortunately, some of the mods on my site keep the bots from DOING anything, but they're still signing up in droves.

Right now almost all of the bots registering are using @gmail.com email addresses. If I add *gmail.com to my banned email list will it ban or break access for existing members who have already signed up with gmail accounts?

 

[Chakrava]

How lazy am I? Tested myself.

If you add an e-mail to the banned list existing users do not seem to be effected.

• Tested by making a temp e-mail on my webserver
• added my address (*mysite.org) to banned emails
• tried to sign up (Can't)
• removed ban
• signed up (works obviously)
• re-added address to banned emails
• logged in and poked around, no problems or errors; able to login, post threads

The only blocked function I found was that I couldn't change my email (temp@mysite.org) to (temp1@mysite.org) since that e-mail is blocked. Even with the admin UI I'm not able to change an e-mail to the banned address.

 

[Blue]

I would have sworn there was an option for this. Another missing core feature.

 

[Chakrava]

It seems like the Ban Email function is basically a "ban email registration" function.

I was kinda hoping to piece together a jury-rigged work around for the short term: have gmail users put in a misspelled address (@gmial.com, and then I could manually change them. All the bots would be spelling it right and get rejected, and my actual users would just have some downtime until I corrected their address. Far from a perfect solution, but I'm brainstorming

I have few enough signups where this would be feasible for my site, but not if I have to tweak the banned e-mails back and forth each time.

 

[mike os]

I think the same... we banned gmail when the registrations were coming fast & seemed to work, existing users were not affected that i know of

i have allowed it again... since no one got to actually post on the forums ( because they all tried using links which the spam sw is set up to prevent for new users....) i am secretly hoping they will forget about us...