Dash Rendar Posted September 21, 2006 Share Posted September 21, 2006 My (IT) forum has been getting a huge amount of spammers lately. They sign up (going through the anti-bot mechanism and email verification) and then they post a load of links to prescription drugs, porn sites, illegal software or whatever. They typically repeat their post two or three times. I then have to go and delete their posts and ban them. Sometimes they just reregister with a different address. Occasionally, I have to set up filters against certain IP ranges or email domains to block them. This wouldn't be so bad, but lately the number of spammers registering outweighs the number of legitimate people. Does the mkivsupra board suffer from these spammers? How do you deal with them? If not, how come I get so many!!? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted September 21, 2006 Share Posted September 21, 2006 We don't (touch wood) suffer from automated spammers here. We have a very obscure image verification system that is pretty difficult for humans to work out, let alone bots. We also insist that non-standard profile fields are mandatory, namely the Location and Country fields. This helps to stop any simple bots that know how to fill out the standard vb registration form. If you are having problems then it might be worth turning on moderation for new members so at least it's just you that see the spammers and not all of your legit members. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angarak Posted September 21, 2006 Share Posted September 21, 2006 Dash > What type of forum software are you using?....is it PHPBB by any chance? Im a mod for a gaming clan and we use PHPBB, we had loads of spam accounts registered, and even the odd post by a spam account and that was with a visual confirmation code! To tackle this I did the following to the PHPBB board: :: Only logged-in members can view the MEMBERLIST (makes it useless to search engines) :: Logged IP addresses of all new registrations (so I can ban them if I want) :: Removed the WEBSITE field from the registration form, and automatically BAN anyone who submits this information (ie: a bot) Since then we havent had a single spam account. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dash Rendar Posted September 21, 2006 Author Share Posted September 21, 2006 Thanks for the tips guys. I'll certainly look into making the non-standard fields mandatory. That's a good idea. So, you think these are automated spammers? I did wonder, but I also thought the image verification would stop this. On the other hand, my image verification isn't very obscure, so maybe I'll step it up a level! I'm using the Invision Power Board engine (version 2). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamesmark Posted September 21, 2006 Share Posted September 21, 2006 Sorry could not help it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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