are there not stronger protections available for sign up such as cloudflare turnstile to prevent registrations in the first place?
There is an official captcha plugin:
As much as I dislike captcha the free tier:
up to one million requests per month
Might do the job? 
For now I have adjusted these settings, which will be annoying for legitimate new users, but we can manually increase new users trust level when it is clear they are genuine:
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Yeah I use hcaptcha on some websites, seems to work well enough
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I’ve added a hcaptcha using a hcaptcha.com account using the same email address for account creation as the CoTech GitHub account, via GitHub SSO.
I’ve set it to always challenge with a hard difficulty, if anyone has issues with account creation please get in contact with someone via email so an admin can manually create an account, in addition we will add support for workers.coop SSO for account creation and logins.
Hopefully this will solve the bot spam…
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Hey Chris how much of a difference has this made? Just looked at your deleting spam thread and it still seems to be going strong?
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I don’t think the hcaptcha made that much of a difference, however that together with the watched words and the fact that now all new users have to have their first post manually approved has more-or-less solved the issue.
Looking at the number of posts per-month on the deleting Discourse spam thread:
- 2 Mar 2025
- 1 Feb 2025
- 3 Jan 2025
- 12 Dec 2024
- 8 Nov 2024
- 4 Oct 2024
- 1 Sep 2024
- 2 Aug 2024
- 3 Jul 2024
- 5 Jun 2025
- 1 May 2024
- 4 Feb 2024
- 1 Dec 2023
Things are basically fine now, it peaked at the end of last year.
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