Registration challenge to stop spam registrations

[spdegabrielle (Stephen De Gabrielle)]

Is there any way to add a registration challenge to the sign-up process to help stop spammers signing up?

Last weekend our site was hit by such a concerted effort to signup and post spam that I had to disable sign-up and make it invitation only.

We do like letting people sign-up without having to find or request an invite.

Is there a way to add a simple questionnaire to the signup process?

We have the standard discourse provided by the very generous Free hosting for open source projects Open Source | Discourse - Civilized Discussion - so installing plugins and similar options are not open to us.

Kind regards,
Stephen

[Lilly (Lillian)]

Hmmm, i’m not sure what solution you can use here. the spam bots use automated post requests to the sign up api endpoint, so any verification question in the UX might get bypassed anyways. i would suggest Discourse hCaptcha but i don’t think you can install it on the free tier.

doesn’t look like it from the pricing/plan page

[NateDhaliwal]

Perhaps Discourse AI’s Spam detection could help? It doesn’t stop registrations, but it hides spam posts. (Also see: Immediate actions you can take during a spam attack and Tips for Preventing Spam)

[Lilly (Lillian)]

is the AI spam detection available for free plans? i’m not sure. i guess Discourse AI plugin is now. the AI spam detection works great if you can get it working for your site. i have it on mine and it keeps things nice and clean of bot nonsense.

[NateDhaliwal]

Yep, I just checked: