thunderseed

Anyway, I’m just going to try and contact my host provider, they might be able to find a way to stop whoever is attacking and flooding my website.

You can close the topic now, but unfortunately the problem was not actually fixed.

And yes regarding your analogy, if I opened a shop and someone was trying to break in while also coming into my shop every single hour scoping out the place, then I would be as equally as concerned.

It doesn’t sound like you really know what you are talking about.

You don’t have an actual fix for this problem so point me in the direction of someone who does.

I AM facing security risks on my website right now. Someone is trying to hack into my admin panel. Along with the recent influx of registrations, it gives me good reason to want to find better security.

This is certainly not a common problem! I’ve had my website running for years, and I have always had registration turned on. 0 problems with this happening before.

Like I’ve already said, I would like to utilize the registration option so turning it off as a silly bandaid fix, is not fixing the actual issue.

None of the plugins are working to stop it.

I’m also getting bruce force attacks so I wonder if it’s related. They seem to be a long ways away from guessing my password, as in they are still at the beginning of the alphabet thinking of every possible word in the dictionary, so I’m going to make my password stronger just in case.

I guess I’m out of options and the only thing I can do is turn the registration off, unless anyone has any other ideas?

@ Jan, because I don’t want it turned off. I don’t consider it useless. And it doesn’t seem to be normal registration spam at all, especially considering all the points I’ve mentioned and the fact that this has never happened before.

I also turned off registration for 5 hours as a test to see if it detours them, turned it back on and am going to test all 3 plugins running at the same time (Akismet, Bad Behaviour and Stop Spammers), and if they don’t work I’m going to look into better security plugins because it might not be spambots I’m dealing with and could be a hacker.

I’m sort of grasping at straws here but in a perfect world I would like to be able to keep the registration setting on because I have been thinking of adding a forum to my site.

They told me that Subscription2 will work perfectly fine with the membership/registration setting turned off so if I have to keep it off, then I won’t lose my readers. But I’d still like to have the option of keeping it on if I wanted to, obviously without being flooded with these weird hourly registrations.

Okay thank you that is great to know, that answers my question!

I have recently installed Stop Spammers, and it hasn’t worked for these particular hourly registrations for some reason but it has worked to prevent tons of other spam so far. I do have another topic for that issue although it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
Anyways, thanks again.

How do you know my security is not being threatened? Please explain. If it is a person that is trying to sign up hourly, that isn’t a good sign, right? If it is a person they’d be more intelligent than spambots which could explain why the plugin isn’t removing their registrations, right?
Login Lockdown by default does a lockdown after 3 login attempts for an hour. And I am getting a new registration every hour which I find coincidental.

I know it’s not the same thing but if they are finding the registration option, they can also easily access my admin panel, right? If I understand it correctly, the Stop Spammers plugin is saying someone is trying to access my admin panel quite frequently. Maybe they are registering to find another way around, I have no idea.

No, it’s not simply the nature of the system because this has literally just started in the last week or so. I have never had this issue before in all the years of having my site. So, why the recent influx? It’s happening literally every hour. And it seems silly to just put a temporary bandaid on it. Nobody should have to shut off registration just to prevent crazy ninja bots or hackers from flooding their site. There has got to be a better way to stop them.

I have researched this exact topic coming up before, and there was no better fix in those topics.

I don’t need assistance with that plugin, it seems to be working just fine, it’s just not picking up on these registrations as being spam.

I just found this website that lets you check the authenticity of email addresses, although I’m not sure how accurate it is. I tested my email address and it seemed to work. https://mailtester.com/
I tested quite a few of these email addresses, a few were not valid, but most of them had ip addresses associated with them but the server didn’t allow verification or something like that – not really sure what that means. So ultimately, I’m still not exactly sure if that’s bots, or a peron using disposable emails or what. But looking at the emails and usernames, they all do seem to be similar in that there’s a first name, first and last name, or name with numbers and the usernames always capitilze the first letter of the name.

The plugin now says it has stopped 185 spammers, so it does seem to be working and doing something. It says there has been 143 admin login attempts. Does that mean someone is trying to hack into my site or try and guess my password? I do have Login Lockdown activated. Could all of those registrations be one person?
Maybe I should be looking into better security plugins?

I would like a better fix for this issue. If they are really spam bots they are getting through that high rated security plugin that is supposed to keep them at bay, which either means that plugin isn’t working or they aren’t spam after all, OR they are the most stubborn spammers in the world. So if they truly are spammers, there must be a better way to prevent them from registering on my site rather than turning off the membership option. I’m literally getting a subscriber every hour, which seems unbelievable to me.

I don’t want to get rid of Subscribe2. I just tried the plugins you mentioned and they did not transfer my email list over. If I get rid of Subscribe2, I also get tid of all of my readers.

Bad news: the registrations are still happening though I have the Stop Spammer plugin activitated!
It says it has stopped 95 spammers so far in just a few hours, but I am still getting new user registration notiications by email.

I already have Akismet running, but I think it only protects against spam comments, not registration comments, and apparently this new plugin you sent me the link to does everything, so I think I’ll delete Akismet and just use the Stop Spammers plugin.

Thanks for the link to that plugin I’ll give it a try now.

I’m using the Subscribe2 plugin/widget, do you know if it will still work if I turn off the membership/register setting?

It’s basically only good if you have hidden content only available to registered members or only want registered people to comment, sort of like how forums operate?

So if I wanted to find a plugin that could add a forum or show how many users are online, would I have to have the membership option turned on or do those plugins run without it?

Oops! Sorry I think I used the wrong name in the title. It’s 404 Not found errors I’m inquiring about, not redirection errors!

More information:

A broken link means that when you click on it, it redirects you to a 404 error. This usually means the url it is linked to no longer exists or has changed.

There is no problem, I just want to know the ways that you can break links – to prevent it in the future. (Because I make stupid mistakes all the time and tend to break my links a lot. I want to make sure I know all the ways that I can break links so that I can prevent it from happening ever again. Because I don’t like fixing links.) Does that make more sense?

When I transferred my wordpress blog and domain over to a new host, all of my links broke, except for the ones linking to outbound sites. I had to spend a few days going through all of my posts fixing all of my links. I did not go through DB, I did it manually through the post editor. I did not have that many posts since im new to blogging and all, but it was tiresome, and I don’t want to ever do it again lol.

Since then I have noticed the links I have manually changed keep breaking randomly, when i do random things. So far I have noticed my main mistake is changing urls, but there might also be other things I am doing, which is why I am asking for a list of things that can cause broken links.
I know it is something I am doing because I have been spending the last week customizing my blog, changing titles, changing SEO, changing themes, changing everything pretty much – changing urls. I already made the mistake of changing urls and breaking my links that way. I did not know that changing my posts url name would wreck my links to it! It should be obvious, but it was not. I now know that changing urls is one major cause to broken links.

That is why I wanted to know if there are any other things I should not do that could possibly ruin my links.

I also wanted to know if there is a plugin out there that can fix your links for you. Because I really do not enjoy it after having to fix my links so many times from making mistakes. If not there should be one invented. I would pay good money for that. Links are horrible to deal with and I never want to see one again lol.

Or if there is a way of making links permanent despite if you change urls or whatever you change?

I just downloaded Broken Link Checker, and used it to fix each and every broken link I could see, actually I deleted most of them because I got tired of the process.

Anyways hope this makes more sense.