So, as some of you may know, I've been dealing with an obsessed troll for about five and a half months who uses VPNs to change his IP address and get around bans. I already have new accounts set to administrator activation, but unlike member activation, the registering user can simply type in any non-functional email address and the system treats it as if it's real. My question is, is there some way other than member activation of accounts to stop the use of fake email addresses when registering?

Hello


You can choose to activate by user.
If email is fake, user will never activate his account.

You could send an email before activating the accounts.

Neither are really the answer I'm looking for. If I enable user-activation, the troll can register (he uses VPNs to get around IP bans), activate the account himself, and spam up the site much easier. I'm wondering if there's a way to prevent the use of fake addresses in the registration process.

You could try banning email address that have the same extension, but then you will be banning people who exactly will help your forum.

Yeah, I can't do that because currently his preferred host to fake is Gmail and it's one of the most widely used hosts. Even then, he would just switch to another one and carry on.

The guy's absolutely obsessed and won't leave us alone. He even filed an abuse report claiming I'm harassing him, though several members of my community will vouch that it's a false claim and he's the one doing the harassing.

Is this person exactly harassing you in the sense that you feel unsafe?  If yes, you might need to contact your local cyber authority.

No, I don't feel as if I'm in physical danger right away since he has no way that I know of to find out my real identity (I don't use Facebook or any other social media sites where my name or face could come out) in addition to me being in America and him in Scotland, but he's been stalking and harassing numerous other people both online and IRL for quite a long time. Basically, some of the people he's done this to got into contact with me and showed me evidence of everything he's done, and I banned him because I didn't feel comfortable having him in my community as I take the privacy and safety of my members very seriously. But since I'm not in physical danger, I have doubts any authorities would be able to do anything. And this is in addition to it being a trans-national thing, which makes it more complicated.

I would set it where you have to activate the accounts.  After awhile, he will get tired creating new accounts that he can not do anything with.

Yes my advice is okay the account's your self OR have it so the member has to okay the account him self.

Now if the address is fake then he will never get the Email to okay the account with.

If the account is not okayed in a week just remove the account from your list.

You can always report IP addresses and Email addresses to Gmail to you know
just list IP addresses and the Emails he has used before and send them to Gmail they will try and Block the address he is using by IP location.

I got a lot of informative information about non-functional email addresses from this discussion, thank you, admin
and members.

Forumotion does not allow registration with fake emails, implemented a system for it.
Another thing is that after being registered if you allow the change you mail users, they can change it.
So the best system is that users, activate email accounts from reaching your emails.