HD Quiz kills WP Spam accounts

I thought I’d share how I’m using this excellent plugin.

My WP website benefits from user contributions (collaborative content). Members join via a front-end registration form.

The problem – although the form employs Google captcha and users must click an email-verifying link to activate their accounts, I was still seeing half a dozen Spam accounts every day – this despite certain other anti-Spam countermeasures.

The accounts aren’t active, but they accumulate and are a chore to delete (it’s a multisite setup integrated with PhpBB, which doesn’t help).

So I disabled WP’s default registration and the link to the custom front page registration form is only revealed by successfully completing HD Quiz.

A would-be member clicks ‘Register’ and is taken to the quiz. This consists of 1 of (currently) 6 possible questions (mostly image based). The questions and 10 multiple-choice answers are, of course, set to randomize.

To answer the questions only requires a basic understanding of what the website is about. For example, a website about dogs could require users to select the odd image of a cat from 9 breeds of dog.

Less than 100% and the user sees a ‘Failed!’ message with a ‘Try Again’ link which reloads a different quiz question. Otherwise the user sees ‘Success’ message with a link to the registration form.

Using this extra code kindly posted by Harmonic Design, the user is automatically taken to the registration form upon solving the quiz.

I’ve had this live for several days and Spam accounts have gone from 6 a day to zero. And yes, genuine users are still joining.

I found no other suitable WP challenge question plugin, so was pleased to see that HD Quiz is perfect for the job. Thank you!