Spambot Resistrations

[Bound2Burst]

It took them quite a while, but one of them found us a few weeks ago. It's an old bot, known in the OpenCart community for years. All it does is create fraudulent registrations. It's for this reason, as well as dealing with scammers, that the registration option was switched to admin approved before a new sign up can log in. This stops the bot doing any harm. I have had several reports from customers saying they have received notices of dozens of registration attempts attached to their e-mail address. Again, this is harmless, just irritating, the main intention of those who create this malicious software. Rest assured, the attempted registrations go nowhere, so no one is doing anything illicit with your e-mail account.

I am working on introducing Google's reCaptcha to stop this activity, and have done so on my new Undress4Me store. That store is a much later version of OpenCart and works fine with reCaptcha. Alas, the older versions (B2B and BiB) are a bit more of an issue. Because of their age, they have been patched to make them run under PhP 5.4. In doing so, it prevents me upgrading the VQmod software that would allow reCaptcha to work. I am working on tracking down the author of the patch to ask if he can adapt it to work with the latest version of VQmod, then I can probably fix the spambot problem.

The ultimate solution is to upgrade OpenCart of course, but I fear great devastation if I attempt that and it fails, something I am moderately afraid will occur. In theory, I could just remove it and replace it with the old version, but it may also implement changes which would stop the old version working again. I feel I have much to lose if I create more problems than I solve.

If I run any tests that will take the store offline for a while, I will post a warning here to ensure no one is trying to download a purchase when the downtime occurs.