Reducing spam in Moodle

Here are some suggestions for reducing the risk of spam in Moodle:

• Leave "Force users to login for profiles" enabled in Administration > Security > Site policies to keep anonymous visitors and search engines away from user profiles.
• Leave self registration disabled in Administration > Users > Authentication > Manage authentication common settings, or limit self registration to particular email domains with the allowed email domains setting, or only enable self registration for a short period of time to allow users to create accounts, and then later disable it.
• If Email-based self-registration is used for self registration, add spam protection to the new account form by enabling reCAPTCHA (in Moodle 1.9.1 onwards).
• If Email-based self-registration is used for self registration, leave "Email change confirmation" enabled in Administration > Security > Site policies (in Moodle 1.8.6 or 1.9.2 onwards).
• Consider the spam risks involved in allowing certain capabilities, such as replying to forum posts, for visitor accounts.