Blast of Forum Spammers - What To Do?

[tigrrr]

I recently had a blast of spammers and i'm not sure if i dealt with it the proper way. I ended up ip banning all countries except the ones i want my site to show up. Do you guy think i made a mistake by doing so?

[snakeair]

Originally Posted by tigrrr

I recently had a blast of spammers and i'm not sure if i dealt with it the proper way. I ended up ip banning all countries except the ones i want my site to show up. Do you guy think i made a mistake by doing so?

What forum software are you running?

Some countries are known for spamming forums and using bot's to auto-register and post on forums but you can just ban there IP and not the country. If you notice the same email extension that keeps spamming the forum, ban that email extension besides the IP. There can still be quality posters from that one country. If you keep banning countries, your traffic will not get that large since half the world will eventually be blocked from your forum.

Some forum softwares, have some plugins that will help kill some of these spammers besides you taking other pre-cautions.

FYI, i'm going to move your post into the forum management section. This is a good topic to discuss with other forum admin's and moderators.

[MrSS]

Check out this thread: Stopping Forum Spam
Except to forum software installed, active Moderators can surely aid your problem. Forum spam is a normal scenario, you just need to be spam proof to sweep them out and keep 'em off-limits. I love playing whack-a-mole, where spammers are the mole and Moderators are the hammer. It's also like playing hide and seek. Enjoy whacking them out, then when they notice a forum keeps them blocked, they would find another nest and cross your forum out of their invaded forums.

IP ban is dangerous, have you considered some of 'em might be using proxy address? If so and not taking it in consideration, like Snakeair have said, you would miss some quality members from that country. I can whisper you some country having lots of spammers, just send me PM.

[tigrrr]

Thanks guys i will have to really think about how i will pursue this further. The way i figured was that I would only want people in the US UK and Canada but you guys make some really good points. MrSS Just sent you a pm

[fabioski]

At the moment at least 5-6 new members/day are spammers. How to block them?
I manage a VBulletin forum. This is a real problem!