preventing members with opayq.com email addresses

[branjita]

Forum URL: dragonballfigures.boards.net

What would be the best way to prevent members from registering for my forum with opayq.com email addresses? Email addresses using this service are disposable, masked email addresses. Essentially, from my perspective, people who don't want to be identified, operate under the radar, and have a higher likelihood of joining to cause problems.

Shall I add the term as a censored word? Or is there a control I do not know about?

[Michael]

Hi,

Email blocking cannot be done on a forum-level basis it has to be done by us service-wide. We don't like to completely block some email providers (though we do of course) and always keep track of throwaway accounts and the services they use.

[David Clark]

Perhaps you'd be interested in Restricted Registration, enabled in your admin panel in Admin > Settings > Forum Settings > Login & Registration tab. Enabling this will mean that every new person that tries to register will be told, at the end of registration, to wait for a staff member to review their application.

Meanwhile, on the other end of things, you as the admin will receive a notification alerting you to new registrants, and you'll be able to view their chosen username, e-mail address and IP address before being able to make a decision on whether or not to allow them to complete registration.

[branjita]

Thanks for the super surprisingly fast responses guys!

Have you seen unusual activity by users using opayq.com email addresses? As soon as I googled it, I thought it was fishy, and it was the first time I've heard of it. The person was also using a very, uh... simple IP address, that looked fishy as well. 178.0.1.101, which if I google that, it's located in Germany. My forum doesn't have any German members currently, though the anime and manga were both released there a long time ago. Just seems overall fishy to me.

I do have the restricted registration currently, which is why I noticed it.

I do have one more question though. On my forum, you are now required to have 10 posts before you can PM. When this user registered, I accepted their registration and immediately disabled their ability to post. I sent them a PM and told them that they would be allowed to post if they changed to a real email address.

So I actually have 2 questions.

1. Would this user be able to see the PM I sent them? I hope so, as the 10 post requirement is meant as a preventive measure to keep people from joining and harassing others and/or attempting to negotiate trades of figures or other things.

2. If they WOULD be able to see the PM I sent them... Would they be able to reply to me, since I am the one who PM'd them and they currently have 0 posts?

[CheatAreZee]

1: Yes, they would be able to see the PM you sent to their account.

2: Looking at your settings, they can't respond currently. But if you visit your admin panel, then navigate to Settings > Forum Settings, set "Members Restricted from Sending PMs Can PM Staff" to "Yes". Once this is in place, they can PM staff members on the forum (and in return would be able to respond to your PM), but would be unable to PM regular members on the forum

[branjita]

Man, as always, Ricky, you da man!

[CheatAreZee]

Hope it helps! Feel free to let us know if you need anything else

[Just a little thing about this]

JUst an FYI, I use this service in case of data breeches. If someone hacks you or some other site i use and gets my email address they can not use it to obtain access to my other accounts, but all my emails still come to one convenient location. It also can show you who is selling or spamming your email address.

[Former Member]

Be that as it may, the main use of those disposable email addresses, is by spammers and trolls.
On my old sites, and on my blogs, I have a lot of email providers blocked, due to 99% of spammers I had gotten, were from those providers. I also blocked some, just because of the email domain being, um, shall we say less than decently named....

(removed)

As can see, the list has some rather odd provider names.

[CheatAreZee]

Just going to point out that this topic is almost a year old and has been well resolved. I'll go ahead and lock this, but if anyone has a similar question you're welcome to create a new thread