[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #43273: set users_can_register to 0 by default

[WordPress Trac]

#43273: set users_can_register to 0 by default
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 Reporter:  kingannoy       |      Owner:
     Type:  enhancement     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |  Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  General         |    Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal          |   Keywords:
  Focuses:  administration  |
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 People are abusing the new-user-registration form of wordpress to send
 (single) unwanted emails from a large amount of websites to someone they
 want to inconvenience.

 For more info on this "trolling" technique have a look at this article:
 https://www.wired.com/story/how-journalists-fought-back-against-crippling-
 email-bombs/

 In my experience (support at a few different webhosting companies) the
 user registration feature is not used by the majority of users, however it
 causes a few negative effects when it is left '''on''' by default.

 Negative effect 1: People get spammed, see the article from wired for more
 explanation.

 Negative effect 2: The databases of the websites that are abused in this
 way are filled with (inactive) fake users. In my relatively small sampling
 this was between 1.000 and 6.000 fake users. This database pollution is
 unwanted.

 Negative effect 3: The recipients of these emails mark them as spam, this
 gives the mailservers used for sending these emails a bad reputation, this
 in turn makes it more likely that other (wanted) emails are going to be
 rejected.

 Setting the users_can_register value in the database to 0 by default seems
 like a really easy way to quickly solve this issue for practically all new
 WordPress sites from here on out.

 Maybe a fix can also be proposed for fixing this for existing sites as
 well, for example switching it to 0 in a single update.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/43273>
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