Bogus User Registration: User Role Editor Plugin Could Control It

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Bogus user registration poses a problem to both large and small website owners.  The term bogus user registration in this context refers to a user sign up which is not genuine.

This fake user registrations become a problem to a website if the website allows members registrations. Fake registrations make it hard for the website owner to differentiate between genuine users and fake users.

Many website owners tend to think that identifying individuals behind bogus user registrations and banning them from accessing the site is the best solution to the problem.  As a result, they will spend a lot of resources including time to develop tools supposedly designed to block or ban spammers from accessing their site.  While this approach may be effective in denying the individuals behind fake registrations on websites the access to them, it has two major drawbacks. 

First, genuine website users can be unwittingly banned from accessing the website if the website owner is using the block country tool for denying access to bogus users.  Second, banning individuals behind fake user registrations may not stop fake user sign ups.  In many cases, the individuals responsible for fake user registrations are very knowledgeable in network security.  They know how to circumvent any blocking features you may configure on the site to ban fake users from accessing the website. Consequently only genuine users from the country in which individuals have been blocked from accessing the website may be harmed by the country blocking features.

Instead of spending vast amount of resources on developing or configuring tools for banning fake users from registering on your website and thereby causing unintended consequences for genuine users, you can use simple but effective plugins such as the User Role Editor Plugin to control registered users to your site.       

There are three ways of installing the User Role Editor Plugin to prevent bogus user registration.  You can visit the Wordpress.org website to download the user role editor to your computer.  Extract or unzip the plugin in a zip file to a different folder.  Upload this extracted or unzipped files to your server using file transfer tools such as Filezella.  After uploading the plugin using the file transfer tool, log in to your website with an administrator privilege.  Activate the uploaded plugin from the administrator dashboard by clicking on plugins > Installed Plugins > User Role Editor > Activate.   

The User Role Editor can also be installed using the Add New option in the Plugins within the administrator’s dashboard.  In order to do this, you must be logged in as administrator and should click on plugins > Add New.  Type in User Role Editor in the search box that appears in the new page.  Search for the User Role Editor among the plugins that come up.   Once you found the plugin click the Download option beside it to download the plugin.  Following the download, the Activate Plugin option will come up in the next window.  Click this Activate Plugin option to activate the installed User Role Editor.  If the activation is complete a message stating Plugin has been successfully activated will come up. 

You can also install the User Role Editor by downloading the plugin to your computer from the Wordpress.org website and then uploading the unzip files to your website.  This is how you can upload the User Role Editor using this method.  Login to the backend of your website with administrator’s rights.  Click on Plugins option > Add New > Upload Plugins > Browse.  Search for the downloaded User Role Editor Plugin.  Select the User Role Editor and click install. Activate the plugin after it has been installed successfully. 

The next stage after installing and activating the User Role Editor Plugin is to create and set privileges for different user groups.  Creating different user groups can be difficult and complicated.  For this reason I recommend the creation of just only three different user groups and assigning access rights to these groups.    Name one of these groups Subscribers, Contributors or anything else you prefer.  Deselect all the user access levels within this category except the read access level.  This should be the default group assigned to newly registered users on your website.  Inevitably all bogus users who have registered on the site will fall into this group. 

Create another group and name it Main Users, Business Users or any name you like.  Assign the read, write, and edit own work rights to this group.  This group should be the trusted group which is not bent on harming your website.  Take note that users cannot automatically belong to this group.  You or other Administrators on the website can only assign users to this group manually.

The third user group you can create is necessary only if you have other administrators accessing the site.  Name this user group the Administrators Group.  Like the preceding user group, you will move users you have designated as administrators to this group manually.  Be careful when assigning rights to users.  Select the delete or edit role option only for users with administrator’s rights.

You should check the All Users option on your website regularly to determine if there are new users to assign to different groups.  Always assign newly registered users to the appropriate user groups.  Lastly, the user role editor referred to in this article can only work on WordPress Sites.


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