Best free registration process to avoid spammers/scammers

Question

AT the moment, the site I look over sends an activation email to new members which have a link they must click to activate their account. While this seems like a good idea, it has many faults such as occasionally the email lands in their spam/junk folder and its yet another step the user has to do.

I was try to make it easier for users to join and activation seems to be the biggest hurdle. We have put this in place to avoid spammers and scammers and it does work. I don't want to go for the 'moderation' method either.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I think at this point, email activations and CAPTCHAs are so common, the users are used to it. I wouldn't worry about email activations, but I would warn against overuse of CAPTCHA. I'm thinking of one forum I checked out recently which insisted on an image and logic CAPTCHA on registration, and then again for each of your first five posts. Considering the image CAPTCHA was the same generation each time and the logic CAPTCHA was identical each time, I think it was overkill.

Answer 2

One alternative is to do it the the way StackOverflow does and create an account by linking it to their gmail account (or similar) automatically. Theres minimal hassle to the user then and its a valid way of attempting to ensure that the user is legitimate

Answer 3

I'm guessing that by the "'moderation' method" you mean actually have moderators that watch over the site and ban spammers. I can understand your dislike for such a system, but an alternative that a lot of sites use is peer moderation (e.g. StackOVerflow or Slashdot). This still means that spam gets posted, but it usually gets flagged or otherwise modded down so far that no one will ever see it.

Another tactic is a reputation system that requires a certain level of rep before one is allowed to post links. StackOverflow has a system like this as well (you can't even comment before you reach a certain level of reputation). This can be a little annoying at the beginning, but it's definitely effective at eliminating spam.

And as already mentioned by others, CAPTCHAs are probably the easiest anti-spam technique to implement. There are many libraries and APIs out there for generating CAPTCHAs, and you can even put the tests to good use by using reCAPTCHAs to help digitize books. The drawback is that automated CAPTCHA-deciphering algorithms are getting better and better, and the spammers without the ability to implement them can often farm the work of solving CAPTCHAs out to 2nd/3rd world workers.

Whatever method you choose, there's going to be some level of inconvenience for the user, but most of the common techniques are readily accepted by users and worth the trade-off to eliminate spam.

Answer 4

The most used way is a verification mail + captcha, because usually emails from unknown sources aren't sent to spam folder. I tried this way with Gmail and Hotmail and both are working perfectly.

You can also use other systems such as using the OpenID (I think this is a very good way), Gmail account, Facebook acccount etc...