Stopping Forum Spam

[howinfo]

As I noticed that capcha has become increasingly ineffective I did changes to question and answers option and it has really worked well, have not had any spam signup since.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by howinfo

As I noticed that capcha has become increasingly ineffective I did changes to question and answers option and it has really worked well, have not had any spam signup since.

Q&A is a type of CAPTCHA.

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[howinfo]

Originally Posted by deepsand

Q&A is a type of CAPTCHA.

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Actually what I meant was that I disabled captcha from captcha.net

[Bogdan22]

Unfortunately xrumer becomes smarter and smarter and also has a learning curve...The only one that can stop forum spam is Google by de-valuating links from forums...

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by Bogdan22

Unfortunately xrumer becomes smarter and smarter and also has a learning curve...The only one that can stop forum spam is Google by de-valuating links from forums...

Even where that practicable, it would have little effect, as very many such posts are intended to gather traffic, not PR.

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[robjones]

Originally Posted by Bogdan22

Unfortunately xrumer becomes smarter and smarter and also has a learning curve...The only one that can stop forum spam is Google by de-valuating links from forums...

Naah, even if the program gets improved there's the fortunate fact that most people that use it are dumber than toast and lazy as well. Doesnt matter how many whistles and bells something has added on if the user is a blithering idiot.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by robjones

... if the user is a blithering idiot.

Don't see very many of those, do we?

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[KGCustoms]

Originally Posted by robjones

Naah, even if the program gets improved there's the fortunate fact that most people that use it are dumber than toast and lazy as well. Doesnt matter how many whistles and bells something has added on if the user is a blithering idiot.

My experience is showing that the "average user" is indeed lazy in filling out a registration form (any error whatsoever they give up and rarely return to try again). The Spammers, contrarily, are not.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by KGCustoms

My experience is showing that the "average user" is indeed lazy in filling out a registration form (any error whatsoever they give up and rarely return to try again). The Spammers, contrarily, are not.

Doesn't mean that they're very smart about evading detection once they're in.

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[Bogdan22]

Originally Posted by robjones

Naah, even if the program gets improved there's the fortunate fact that most people that use it are dumber than toast and lazy as well. Doesnt matter how many whistles and bells something has added on if the user is a blithering idiot.

Rob, does not matter how lazy a spammer is...they just fill the details once, upload like 1 million forums and click "start spam fest"....
Hate them!

[robjones]

Understood... But having watched a boatload of the guys that fill it out poorly I've come to recognize their comedy routine for what it is. I still dislike the stuff, but it isn't near as stealthy in the hands of the spammers as they wish it was.

Reminds me of back when VCRs came out. They had all these advanced functions, but nobody knew how to use them and the darned thing blinked 12:00 all the time.

[Snooks]

but nobody knew how to use them and the darned thing blinked 12:00 all the time.

So when did you come into my lounge room Rob? Or was that a lucky guess?

[alter-ego]

A good way to filter out bots that bypass the registration roadblocks is to create a New Member Usergroup (don't use your software default). Since bots seem to make their presence known within the first 5 posts, set the promotion to the next usergroup to 5 or 10 posts.

Then, lock off all the common areas that can be potentially spammed such as:

• User CP: Only allow the minimum accesses such as password changes.
• Require e-mail verification for account activation.
• Set PM limits to a low value of 5 total PM's (includes Savebox, Sentbox, etc.)
• filter out common spamwords such as: http://codex.wordpress.org/Spam_Words
• set a url filter
• do not allow forum signatures or avatars
• do not allow guest messaging

The above certainly helps to keep spam out of the public eye and makes it easier for mods/supermods/admins to identify and police abhorrent behavior.

[Groovystar]

I have found that it also helps to check what sites may be linking in towards your forum. If any are in spammy neighbourhoods you are going to see a spam increase. Stay out of those types of neighbourhoods with regards to sites linking to you. If you identify any it can't hurt to ask to have the link taken down. This isn't foolproof by any means but just one more way to close up any spam loopholes along with smart Captcha use, etc.

[Dan]

Reviving old thread - sorry, need to be done.

Forum spam management. Have a couple of questions regarding vBulletin

1. Deleting all awaiting email confirmation members
So I have literally 11,000+ of these sitting there taking up valuable database space. These are the nonsensical signups, that never activated and which send an "undeliverable message" email every umpteen hours to the forum admin address (multiply the several for each member by several hundred signups a day and you can see why it is annoying). I want these gone is there anyway to mass delete the entire lot of 11,000+

2. Banning using the ? wildcard
I tried using this in the User Banning Options section in the AdminCP, for email addresses (e.g. the majority of signups that are awaiting email conf, are from addresses like wcqz.com, jjjj.com, zzxd.com etc). So is it possible to somehow ban @????.com, since 4 letter email address are super rare, and 99% of my spam signups are using them?

Love the help. xrumer is nasty as hell.

[robjones]

Bumping Dan's question for visibility. Definitely one a lot of VB forum owners need to know, and we have plenty of those around here.

Anyone happen to be familiar with a solution to his questions?

[cmpe]

Originally Posted by Dan

1. Deleting all awaiting email confirmation members
So I have literally 11,000+ of these sitting there taking up valuable database space. These are the nonsensical signups, that never activated and which send an "undeliverable message" email every umpteen hours to the forum admin address (multiply the several for each member by several hundred signups a day and you can see why it is annoying). I want these gone is there anyway to mass delete the entire lot of 11,000+

Hey Dan,

Try this:
Admin > Users > Prune / Move Users

You should be able to select the awaiting email confirmation usergroup. Apply any other criteria as you see fit.

You should be able to mass select using the checkbox column on the far right and then delete.

Originally Posted by Dan

2. Banning using the ? wildcard
I tried using this in the User Banning Options section in the AdminCP, for email addresses (e.g. the majority of signups that are awaiting email conf, are from addresses like wcqz.com, jjjj.com, zzxd.com etc). So is it possible to somehow ban @????.com, since 4 letter email address are super rare, and 99% of my spam signups are using them?

I do not believe this is possible with vBulletin out of the box. However, I do have some tips for everyone to slow down spam:

1) Use Question and Answer Verification and create 20 or so custom questions for your own forum. We actually currently have a "no registration required" forum to allow anyone with any type of pre-sale questions to post without needing to go through the registration process. So we used to have quite a few spam posts per day.

With the Q&A verification, we've reduced it down to like 1 spam post every other day or so.

reCAPTCHA is as useless as... well, I'll stop there.

2) Check out http://www.stopforumspam.com/ - this is sort of like Akismet for forums. In fact, it does use Akismet as well like Wordpress. There are bunch of mods and hacks available for various forum software. From what I've read, this is a popular choice.

Ironically, I just installed the mod on our vB4 forum today. I will report back to see how it turns out.

[pwhrita]

We do not allow any user to post until he approves welcome email sent after signup. That helps to get genuine user. Since I have noticed that the spammer generally use non-existing email addresses. Also we use akismet in our vb forum that also prevents a lot spams.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by pwhrita

We do not allow any user to post until he approves welcome email sent after signup. That helps to get genuine user. Since I have noticed that the spammer generally use non-existing email addresses.

That will not stop a person from enrolling, and then using a robot for posting purposes; or, giving/selling the credentials to another who then does the actual spamming.

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[sitetutor]

The Q and A is a big one with the right Qs. One to add is always "Where are you located?" and I bet you most of the spam bots will be caught in a lie (if they bother to fill that one out).