Is there a way to restrict disk usage by users in a multi-site

Question

my name is Shaggy.

After countless hours of research browsing Forums on Multi sites trying different plugins I am still at a loss please help. You see I am an author, an indie author and I was trying to put together a free multi-site for resources on publishing and editing. A place, where I can compile useful information for new and aspiring authors to help, answer their questions.

I wanted to open up the multi-site so that aspiring authors could create their own WordPress site for their author profile and Book Sales of course that would be the free version also included would be a paid version where they can make as many sites as they want.

The problem is there is no place to restrict a user from the number of sites that they can create. So an average free user could make 10,000 sites for free each one would be governed by the uploaded and storage file size that I've preset.

But the file sizes are not associated with a user, only a site. It would be nice if the file size was associated with the user then they could create two or three sites or whatever as long as they stay within their preset megabyte limit.

so as you can probably already tell I have one multi-site with about a bazillion plugins probably the size of an 8K video by now. I have tried code Snippets and countless plugins could somebody please help I would like to offer a free website per user for their author profile and Book Sales how is it done.

Answer 1

If limiting users to one account were so easy, there wouldn't be sploggers and fake profiles out there... So short answer is, can't be done.

Long answer, you could put something in place to record the IP of the user signing up and check if that IP address has signed up before, but it wouldn't be completely reliable, the user could easily access site via a proxy to bypass the check...

Longer answer, maybe don't even be too concerned, it's gonna be rare that a user will have that much time or content to be using multiple free accounts like this.

Instead, you might want to look for plugins that protect against signup SPAM (aka "splogging") to reduce this kind of thing happening from the start.