Do you ban the use of specific email addresses for registrations on your site? I know of a few that ban most free email providers - @yahoo, @hotmail, @gmail - but how many members are they losing because of this?
Many do, but a bad thing to do. Banning a provider makes no difference, you will end up loosing new members unless you get large no. of new registrations every day.
I agree, it's not something I'd ever consider doing. One of the big corporate boards I help maintain blocks new registrations using a free email address and threatens to ban members who change to one. They have no idea how many potential members they are losing by having such a policy and quite honestly I can't see one good reason why they do it especially as there are strong anti-measures already in place.
I used to have bad behaviour mod which seems to have some connection with Project Honeypot. It was giving adverse results, so had to disable it.
I'd love to ban the major freemails (Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail) but too many legitimate users have them. I've noticed a large uptick in spammers using Gmail the past 6 months or so.
Sorry, but I know no one who do not use either Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail except for admin friends who use their domain powered IDs. But that too for official forum / blog related communiction only. For personal or any other use, they use one of these top 3.
Banning those would slaughter my site utterly. Determined bots will use more obscure things like mail.ru and beyond anyway, so it's not a good bot filter, and people trying to circumvent bans can't keep their mouths shut in the long run even if I didn't do detective work as a boredom filler at 3 in the morning at random.
I don't ban email addresses from free providers, I use them myself for privacy but I do ban IP addresses and whole countries to keep the spam down.
Here's my "no welcome here" list: .pl .cn .ru .kp .kr .ng .su .ua .ug .vn .cz .il It has made a great improvement, particularly from .ru
I don't ban the free providers because it turns away a lot of legit users and we have other things in place to catch the bots. I do however ban the "throw away/one time use" e-mail providers because those tend to be used by trolls.
I have never restricted email address registrations on any community I've owned in the past. Should you do so, you may run the risk in turning away potential active members who could have provided content. The bulletin board software should have measures that can be used to help combat spam, or at least make the human moron's life more hellish by answering a CAPTCHA.
