Editable registration question

[brettz95]

Hi,

I would think that one tool which could tremendously reduce spam (I've modified other software similarly before and found great results) is to require the applicant to answer a question before even accepting the registration (and thus needing to filter through spam comments caused by spammy registered users).

Rather than centralizing this fully, if you allowed the administrator to be able to modify the question and answer, this would ensure a nice diversity of questions so that each WordPress blog would have its own question. This would require spammers to either hire people to crack and check for updates to the questions (in which case they'd thankfully ignore a lot of smaller blogs and perhaps also be challenged with larger blogs who could afford to change the questions more frequently), give up, or get into the AI business (in which case, they could make money without spamming).

Could you add such an admin option? I really think this could be a game changer for those of us flooded with spam...

[strider72]

Sounds like plugin territory. In fact, the "Quiz" plugin does exactly as you describe, but for comments. Perhaps I could modify it to work for user registrations as well.

Marking "wontfix" -- high mucky-mucks please feel free to override. ;-)

[brettz95]

Seems to me like a feature everyone should have so they get a good impression of Wordpress--cutting off spam at the root so it doesn't bother the admin either. Of course, a plugin that does such a thing would be better than nothing...

[brettz95]

Look, I've set up a little ol' Wordpress blog, and now, after maybe a week of not checking, I have to go through 300 comments sprawled across a number of pages to delete these junk messages---and this is the case despite the fact that I am pre-moderating comments.

All that would be required to prevent this would be one preference which allowed me to ask a question requiring a particular answer of my own choosing. If there is one thing which should endear you to all your users (not just those who find their way to a plugin page, assuming it is kept updated for new incarnations of Wordpress) and even gain more new users as a result of a better impression of using Wordpress, I think it would be this. Spam would be defeated. And we could all go on blogging with human bloggers. Please do consider reopening this... Thank you...