Fighting Member Registration Spam in ExpressionEngine

Member registration spam has become an issue in running ExpressionEngine websites. I have been using EE since it was called pMachine and up until a few months ago, member spam was not really a widespread problem.

ExpressionEngine has grown in popularity over the last few years (especially since the release of the free core version) and now that enough people are using it, EE has become a target for spammers.

There have been many solutions to combat member registration spam posted in the EE forums and most recently in the ExpressionEngine blog.

These methods include changing the member profile trigger [...]

404 Error Control in Expression Engine

One of the things that has always concerned me about using Expression Engine is 404 error control. With the template system being so flexible with segments, includes, etc… there is a “vulnerability” when it comes to 404 error control. Not so much for a small EE site, but on large scale applications there could be problems with large numbers of bogus urls returning 200 status codes.

Problems could be caused by template coding errors or on the darker side of things it could be used by a competitor to damage your search engine rankings or create other problems for you.

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