New user control

Hi Gezz3D,

I’m a bit confused as to what you mean users creating lists of phantom users. Only admins should be able to create users. Do you mean that people are creating lots of dummy/spam user accounts?

Hi David,
What keeps happening is that I get a person joining the site. They show up as a new member. Then when I go to the wordpress admin panel and click on the ‘user’ tab i see a long list of users that have been somehow created by the new member. I’ve no idea how they are doing this.
What I’d like to do is, whenever a new person applies to become a member of the site that I can check they are a genuine member and not someone who wants to mess around with the site before they can join.
Hope this makes sense.
Gezz

Hmm, the Users panel doesn’t mention “who” created a user account. It only details the account username and email, essentially, as you can see at the following:
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Users_Users_SubPanel

Is there a particular user tab you’re referring to? Maybe from a different plugin?

Hi David,
Yes it’s the standard WordPress users tab.
The new member shows up in the buddypress members page and the users they created show up in the wordpress user tab.
One odd thing is that every time someone does this they seem to make less and less users. The first time it happened there was about 300 ‘users’. This morning someone did it and there was only 2 new ‘users’.
If you go to;
https://northwoodhall.s3dsdesign.com/members
you’ll see a member called lucianmayes. They are one of the people who joined to set up these accounts. I’ve deleted the rest of them.
If you go to;
https://www.s3dsdesign.com/wp-prob.html
I did a screen print of the users list. The ones that have numbers are the ones created by the member ‘lucianmayes’.
Thanks for your help.
Gezz

Thanks for clarifying that Gezz. So to clarify, the new member shows up in the BuddyPress members page and the users that member creates don’t show up in that member page as well, but do show up in your user tab?

Hi David,
Yes that’s correct.
Gezz

I’m unable to create a new user without that new user showing up in the BuddyPress directory, so I’m not sure how that could occur.

One thing to check though, what user role do new users have when signing up on your site?

Come to think of it, it sounds like maybe those are simply user accounts that haven’t been validated (ie. haven’t confirmed activation via email).

I’d have to say, it sounds like what’s occurring is you’re getting spammed.

DavidM – WPMU DEV wrote:

“Come to think of it, it sounds like maybe those are simply user accounts that haven’t been validated (ie. haven’t confirmed activation via email).
I’d have to say, it sounds like what’s occurring is you’re getting spammed.”
Hi David,
For some reason your replis are not showing up on the forum (at least at my end).
Yes, this is some kind of spamming. For the ‘users’ I do not get any e mail saying there has been a new member, just when there is a new member through buddypress.
Really I need something that has to go via me before anyone can be a member.
Cheers
Gezz

At the moment I have set it so that the new user is a subscriber. If I changed that to inactive and then changed it to subscriber when I know that they are a bonafide member would that sort the problelm out?

In your case, I think that would help. Do you have anything to help protect your registration from spam users?

Actually I just tested out creating a new member after re setting the user level to inactive but it seemed that the user could still post on the forum and do the same as a subscriber, so it may not stop these phantom users. I don’t have anything to protect against this.
I’ve looked at membership plugings briefly in the past but can’t remember if there is a membership level that could be utilised for this sort of thing.

Well, if you don’t have anti-spam protection, the following just came to my attention and seems promising.
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

While I think it may be anti-spam protection rather than a membership plugin you’d need for this, I’d definitely advise Membership Lite.
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/membership/

You could perhaps create a simple membership level that has extremely limited functionality (you’ll have extensive control over what they can access) and you could then choose to upgrade them to a real membership as you see fit.

Hi David,
Thank you very much for the info. I’ll definately have a look at the stop-spammer plugin. It sounds like what I’ve been looking for.
I think you are right that anti spam is more what I’m looking for than membership. Membership does give you different levels but tends to be more about paid levels and control over certain pages.
Thanks again.

My pleasure! The plugin is most often used for paid levels, but it does work equally well for simply restricting public access to areas of the website.

But yeah, it does seem as if spam stopping software’s what you’re looking for there. ??