Joomla Spambots / Spammers Registration

​This is a quick article where I will share with you some tips on how to prevent or at least reduce spammers and spambots from registering and posting articles on your Joomla Website.  If you are in the same boat as me, a few times a week you receive notifications about new user accounts created on your site but after looking at the accounts and/or their posts, you quickly found out that these were spammers therefore unwanted "friends".  Also, looking at their email address, you probably noticed that some of their addresses were from the same domain or even top level domain.  Here's what I did to prevent and reduce spammers from registering and accessing my site.

Like most of you, I spent a little bit of time on Googe, looking for Joomla options on how to prevent spammers from registering to my site.  First thing first, you should already have activated the Captcha under your Global Configuration / Site Settings.  This is the first screening but unfortunately this is not enough.  You can use other third party Captcha extension if you wish, on my side I simply configured and activated the Default Captcha.

Next, I found a decent plugin call "Stop Registration Bots" from ZOO Mods Plus where it is possible to prevent bots to register to your side.  This plugin is free and you can block names, email address, top level domain (TLD), usernames etc.  Personally I used this plugin to block top level domain like .ru, .pl, .top etc.  These were the top level domains widely used by spammers and spam bots in my situation.  Here's what it looks like in the backend:

Then I found another plugin called "User - SpambotCheck" from vi-solutions Software + Internet completing the other plugin I had already downloaded and installed.  Both plugins together are filtering spammers and bots from my site to a decent level.  By combining both plugins, I was able to access options from one and another in a way where it significantly reduced the number of accounts created on my site.  On top of the regular blacklist email domains, User - SpambotCheck has interesting options like logging, notifications, interface with "stopforumspam.com" and "projecthoneypot.org" and DNSBL sorbs.net and spamcop.net.  If you add these options to the pre-existing plugin you end up with a decent protection in my opinion.  Let's look at this plugin in the backend:

This is how I managed to reduce spammers and bots from accessing and posting on my site.  I know there are many other options out there and please do not hesitate to comment or share your success at the bottom of this article.  After all, we are all working together against these annoying bots!  Hope this article will help some of you out there.