# "Questionable" account checks at the time of signup?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/questionable-account-checks-at-the-time-of-signup/19068>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [8월 19, 2014, 10:09오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/questionable-account-checks-at-the-time-of-signup/19068 "2014-08-19T22:09:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [9월 29, 2014, 7:22오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/questionable-account-checks-at-the-time-of-signup/19068/7 "2014-09-29T07:22:59Z")

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Just summarizing for @techapj who is going to experiment with doing these checks and logging the results, here are the services to check new user signup IPs against:

1. [http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/](http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/)
2. [SpamCop.net - Blocking List ( bl.spamcop.net )](http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml)
3. [Inspect an IP | Project Honey Pot](http://www.projecthoneypot.org/search_ip.php)
4. [Stop Forum Spam](http://www.stopforumspam.com/search)
5. [http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/tor\_exit\_query.php](http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/tor_exit_query.php)

Interestingly, this may present a problem.. if a user logs in from a validated email service, say, Facebook or Google, they don’t have to wait for an email with a link to have a valid account, they have a valid account _immediately_ after signing up and can begin posting – subject to standard new user sandbox rate limits, of course.

It’s almost like you can’t really approve someone’s account until you hear back from these ~5 different services, to know if the user account should be put in a manual approval queue first.

Well, anyway, @techapj will experiment with doing these checks at signup time, see how long they take, and log the results behind the scenes. No user-facing UI or outcome yet.

(The other potential problem is users who sign up for a new user account from a “good” IP and then switch to an “evil” IP later. Not sure how realistic that is, though..)

edit: we are putting this on hold for a bit as the last few live spammer IPs we checked against these 5 lists had basically _zero_ hits across all lists ⚠ . We’ll continue to spot check live spammer IPs against the 5 lists above, but it isn’t looking so good as a “magic bullet” to prevent spammers from signing up at this point.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/questionable-account-checks-at-the-time-of-signup/19068)._