Denying known spam accounts on WordPress

Let's say you've made a WordPress site, you're pretty happy about it, and you've decided you want to talk to your readership via comments. But you don't want any anonymous comments or to use disqus, and instead you want people to register on your website. So you enable registration for everyone and write your posts.

Fast forward a few months and suddenly you've got 10,000 users registered but half of them are random spam accounts. You start looking through and notice that a lot of the domain names for the websites end in russian domains, or have domain names outside of what you're used to seeing, such as .ru, .li, .website.

This isn't that hard to do with the wordpress filter registration_errors and an implementation is rather simple:

function my_simple_domain_check($errors, $sanitized_user_login, $user_email) {
	//fill out this list with any problem domains
	$spamdomains = array(
		'.li',
		'.website',
		'.ru'
	);
	$ip = isset($_SERVER['X-Forwarded-For']) ? $_SERVER['X-Forwarded-For'] : (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
	foreach ($spamdomains as $domain) {
		if ( strpos($user_email, $domain) !== false ) {
			$errors->add( 'spam_error', __('<strong>ERROR</strong>: Registration halted, please contact support.','mydomain') );
			error_log('SPAMALERT: [email:' . $user_email . ', IP Address: ' .  $ip .']');
		} else { 
			error_log('NEWUSER: [email:' . $user_email . ', IP Address: ' .  $ip .']');
		}
	}

    return $errors;
}

add_filter('registration_errors', 'my_simple_domain_check', 10, 3);

Simply add problematic domain names into the $spamdomains variable and users will not be able to register from those names. If you notice that a lot of those spam users are coming from a single IP address, than you can use something like iptables to drop their packets. The X-Forwarded-For header is checked first because if you're behind a load balancer this is where the real ip address will be (the remote_addr will be the ip of the load balancer and you don't want to ban that!)

I might create a simple plugin that creates a friendlier interface to non-programmers that logs the information to a database instead of the error log. Having a relatively clean error log can be important. After all, exceptions should be exceptional.