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Common Names Causing Rejected Registrations

tehelgee

tehelgee

The stern gaze of justice.
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Please don't use common names as a username.

At least once a week, sometimes more often, an attempted registration will get rejected because a user chose a name that's flagged in the database we use. The reason for most of those is that it's a normal name. Matt, Theresa, Sam, Lucy, Thomas, and so on. Once one of those names has been rejected, future attempts using the same email and IP address get automatically rejected and it becomes a hassle to get people signed up if they email me about it.

So, I'm making this thread to pin with the rules to hopefully cut down on that.
 
Could you explain why attempting to sign up with such a name deserves an IP-ban? It seems pretty harmless to me.
 
A simple warning is probably okay as a stopgap fix, but IP banning should only ever be used as a last resort. It's easy for bad actors to get around, while false positives have a far worse time because IP addresses do not have a 1:1 association with people.

Add a captcha to the registration process, maybe two if you're extra paranoid (one during registration and a different one on the "email confirmed" link page), and instead of having that "common name database" triggering a ban, simply have it trigger the "username already taken" error.
 
This is automatic functionality through XenForo's StopForumSpam integration, which aggregates spam reports across multiple sites. We don't have the ability to make detailed changes to the internals of the system, and just turning it off would increase the spam load on the moderators a lot.

Captchas don't really help; modern computers can solve them, and if not people get paid just to solve captchas 24/7 to let bots spam places.
 
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