Spam user detected in OJS 3.0.2.0

Software Support
1

We have detected spam user in all three journals that we have in our OJS 3.0.2.0. The user is registered despite the fact that we enabled option: The Journal Manager will register all user accounts. Editors or Section Editors may register user accounts for reviewers.

I deleted it but I do not know whether it will appear again. Please advise.
Thanks

2

Hi @vvucic,

I’ve added a fix so that the registration form will respect that setting. See Respect context disableUserReg setting · Issue #2375 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub for details and a patch.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

I edited file according to patch in github. I will monitor situation and let you know if there are issues.

Thanks

4

Dear Alec,
I was use captcha during the use registiration. But in the last months, there are strong spam user registiration in the journal. Our user increased from 2400 to 21.000 with spam users.I was changed our captcha code with new one. The problem persists. Old-style picture-number captcha can be passed in one way with spammer. I want to use JAVA captcha as “I am not a robot” style. But I did not know where to place the codes.

Could you say me, which OJS php page position?
Config php???

Paste this snippet before the closing </head> tag on your HTML template:
<script src='https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js'></script>

Paste this snippet at the end of the where you want the reCAPTCHA widget to appear:

Thank you…

5

Hi @TarlaciSultan,

It looks like some of your post got stripped out – make sure you use the quoting tools when posting. This forum supports Markdown syntax.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

6

OJS 3.0.2 comes with reCAPTCHA support built in. See:

7

Thank you ctgraham.
I already have invisible reCAPTCHA on my site but I want to change to reCAPTCHA v2 ( I am not robot). As far as I know, somehow the spammer pass to the invisible reCAPTCHA and register.

Our journal use OJS 2.4, Is it applicable for reCAPTCHA V2?

8

Hi @TarlaciSultan,

Are you sure your ReCAPTCHA test is actually working? It sounds like it isn’t – all CAPTCHA tests in OJS 2.x should be visible. It’s possible that you have ReCAPTCHA enabled in config.inc.php but your server isn’t accepting that setting; one cause I’ve run into for this is that your PHP server doesn’t have the gd extension enabled in php.ini.

OJS 3.x already supports ReCAPTCHAv2; this hasn’t been back-ported to OJS 2.x (yet).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

9

The priority for the backport of ReCAPTCHA v2 / Invisible ReCAPTCHA to OJS 2.x just got bumped here, so I anticipate doing that in the next couple of weeks.

10

Hi @asmecher,

We are running a version of 3.0.1. It has recaptcha enabled in config file and the regarding image appears in the registration form with no error. However we have noticed some spam users registered in the system recently. We got the keys from google recaptcha. What do you suggest. Can we have both captcha and recaptcha enabled? I believe all the captcha codes are already removed from ojs3.

Thanks
Ghazal

11

Hi @salehig,

I would recommend upgrading to a newer release of OJS 3.x. The built-in CAPTCHA test has been removed, but ReCAPTCHA should work.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team