Patch for registering pr. cell phone?

[humus]

Due to extensive problems with spammers in our current forum, combined with our special responsibility for the posts on our newspapers home page, forum users have to register pr. cell phone. When registering, they submit username, valid email and their cell phone number. The password is then sent to them in form of a text message.

Has anyone seen, used or thought about developing a patch for VB that could do the same in a safe way? Thankful for any response...

Kris

[Zachery]

Hmm, I am not sure how it would be done but i wouldn't rule it out for not being possible, vbulletin does have email authentication and email banning capabilitsy, but i understand thats not what you are looking at. We also have a Image Verification system, this requires users to read the image, and then imput the correct values into the form, if it does not match then it will not let them register.

[Mike Anime]

if someone has AOL IM or AOL email and the cell carrier has internet access with AOL text messaging have them register with their AOL email accounts or AOL screen names. i have used my cell phone for IM use and also have gotten email on it so it SHOULD work.


OR close the forums so only registered users can view ANY of the forums this will keep out email spider bots and make a REAL person have to sign up just to read the forums and as no one could resd without joining the bots cant real email addresses posted on the boards.

[Zachery]

Just to make sure, it will require some hacking if you really want to setup the system this way

[Admiral Spock]

What they could do is, enter their mobile number and select their carrier.

For example if I enter

555-555-5555 in the box for cell number, and select Cingular as my carrier, it should send my password to:

[email protected]

This way it does not take much effort for vBulletin to send the password, it is just really sending an email.

[BlueFlame]

Well Different Carriers follow up on Different Email Format

[humus]

One possibility...

Thanks for the ideas - they gave me one of my own...

We already have an internal SMS-pr- mail-system in our company, which allows us to send a SMS by sending an email to 55555555@(prefix.ourdomain.com)

So, if we tweak the registration page a bit, it should be possible to add a field for the user's cell phone number, then send them some sort of confirmation SMS containing information they need to log on or something...

Two possibilities:
1) Instead of letting the user choose his own password, we build a system which creates a random password and sends it pr. SMS. This can be changed later.

or

2)In addition to the pasword the user himself chooses, we generate a validation code needed to log on the first time. This could be sent pr. SMS.

Just a quick brainstorm. I don't know which of the above would be the least difficult to implement - or if they are safe enough.

Any input in the form of ideas would be highly appreciated.

regards,
Kris