How to approve registrations on tiki.org

Several times per week, we check for new registrations to validate them.

Two objectives

• Help integrate new community members
• Avoid spammer and scammers
• Improve registration and spam prevention process and features -> Spam Protection & Registration

Flow

1. User self-registers at tiki-register.php
2. Community Team approves registration
   • All user that are "not validated"
3. User receives confirmation email
4. User validates email (Tiki should be changed so they validate email first as this reduces work for the site admin and it confirms to the user that (s)he is indeed in the system
5. User participates to the community

If user is a spammer, delete his/her account, user tracker entry, other tracker entries (Experimental), and ban their ip's: all of them are possible in the same process and in bulk, which facilitate the task of thjose willing to help keep tiki.org spammers-free.

How to detect spammers

• When their is a language, there is a higher chance of being legit
• Google their email and/or username
• Check if their SourceForge.net username checks out. Ex.: http://sourceforge.net/users/arion92fr/ Make sure to put all in lowercase.
• Read their description
• Send them a private email
• Check out their domain name
  • If it's a free email hosting, it's a higher chance of spam
    • See: http://www.stopforumspam.com/spamdomainsandips

Dogfood

• PluginListExecute
  • List of users which have only N characters in the About Me (N=2, or other customizable numer). And delete the users, including their tracker info, and ban their IP (all of them possible in one single process).
• It would be nice to have IP address of registrant in the confirmation email
• It would be nice to just be able to reply the registration request to email the person and ask for more info
• We should use a service like stopforumspam.com to provide an estimate of 0 to 10 of the likelihood this is a spammer and just ask more & more questions
• When you delete a spammer, it should also offer to delete the user contributions (spam): comments to tiki objects and forum posts, like what is currently implemented for tracker items.
  • It would be nice to be able to make a list of all items in a tracker that are not associated to a user (perhaps leftover info from a deleted user...)
• Should be possible to ban an e-mail from tiki-admin_banning.php
• Would be nice in the validation email, to have the IP
• Would be nice in the validation email, to have a link to directly delete the user account

• How to confirm registrations on tiki.org