Spammers just keep on Coming - I need HELP please

[Eric HRF]

ok where do I start....My Forum is basically under attack with spam bots and spammers and It's getting out of control:cry: I'm not sure what to do anymore, I've almost tried everything I can think of.

My forum started being attacked almost 2 months ago and it's getting worse. My forum doesn't normally get so many new registrations in one week so that's how I noticed it along with porn and other bad new threads posted by these spammers.

If I new where the 'source' of all this was coming from or how it started, I might be able to fix it. Any ideas here?

I'm also on a few other forums, yet none of them are being attacked like my forum. One forum isn't vbulletion but has over 3000 members.

I have copied down every new members username, IP and email address into notepad as they register and have a ton of them!! I have gone through all of them and blocked their IP's and their email address's and then deleted them.

I then was getting new registrations with gmail, yahoo address's and this was just going too far, so I did a search on one of the yahoo email address's and came up with a site, that was great! Click HERE (http://www.clanorb.com/banlist.php) It gave me a list of Spambots IPs and emails address's that were spamming a few forums..the list is very long! A lot of the IPs and emails matched some of the ones I have banned already, but I am shocked at how many there are....

I then made my own spreadsheet and copied all those IPs into the spreadsheet and put them into accending order, I then wrote all the emails into the same spreadsheet. As the SpamBot site list increases I add them to my spreadsheet and add them to my banning options. I have copied that whole list of IPs and put them into my Banning Options/Ban IPS and did the same for the emails including partial emails. I have over 100 of IPs and email address's being banned!

I also turned on these in Registration Options
1: Moderate New Members - YES
2: Email Address to Notify About New Members - YES with my email
3: Verify Email address in Registration - YES

But the thing with this is...I can't tell if a new registration (email and IP that isn't already blocked) is a spammer/spambot or a person actually wanting to benefit from my forum and it's VERY time consuming. I also don't want a heap of registered users on my forum that are spammers, that sit there waiting for email moderation, it just clogs up the forum.

Yet I'm still getting spammers and spambots registering! I meed some serious help please, I can't spent 1-2hrs every day moderating all these new registrations and banning most of them. My forum has been great before this, the members keep it going smoothly, I'm there to help them out with any questions they ask and to also keep the forum up and running for them.

KiwiJenn
Running (vBulletin 3.5.3) - My Forum I'm referring to isn't the one in the siggi.
I'm Partners with Eric HRF on several Forums:)

[xtreme-mobile]

im having the same problems as you mate

kep getting bits posting sking who they should contact fo link excahnge and they keep posting it again and again

[ART]

won't image verification do the trick?

[xtreme-mobile]

doesnt seem to be no :(

[Eric HRF]

I have that on, and some visual impaired people that want to register to use the forum have to get me to register them as they can't see the small print.

won't image verification do the trick?

[amykhar]

The spam killer mod and the mod to not let people post links until they've got at least 15 posts pretty much nipped spam in the bud for us. The rare spammers we get are humans who post nonsense to get to their 15 posts and then post the link, which we immediately zap.

[optrex]

I have image verification on
I require users to accept the email notification
They then go into a moderation queue to be accepted, before posts are seen

I also insist they complete a mandatory profile field (in my case location and the country flag hack). This means the bot cannot usually cope with the mandatory field and/or the hack field and registration fails.

If its a human they usually put a country flag that doesn't match the location - this then gets binned by the admins.

[Eric HRF]

How do you set that up in registration or in Admin?

I also insist they complete a mandatory profile field (in my case location and the country flag hack). This means the bot cannot usually cope with the mandatory field and/or the hack field and registration fails.

I'm still needing a solution here though...

[DimensionZero]

This has become a bit of a problem on our forum as well.

I started off banning IPs and subnets with .htaccess but since it's impossible to stay ahead of the curve, came here looking for a solution. That list of IPs is great! I've added them to the collection but I also found an add-on here called Akismet Anti-Spam (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=1013953) which I've now installed and will see how that works out for us.

[Eric HRF]

That looks good and would help with spam posts. I have a mod set now that requires a user to have at least 15 post before they can upload images, or post hyperlinks.

My real problem now is I need to stop spammers from registering, is there something to help with this?

thanks

[Roxie]

We've had the same issue over the last few weeks. I have image verification, email verification (which catches a few) and I manually approve all memberships.

Most of the ones registering on my forum use the Jan 1 birthdate. Or they'll have a bunch of spam messages in their registration. So far I only missed ONE out of at least 30.

[Silverstangs]

Spam is a issue on all four of my forums too, I had to disable the Contact us page.. and I always used image verification but that does not seem to stop. I wish there was a hack for Image verification for sending emails.. but I disabled the feature instead. I also STOPPED accepting new registrations from @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com addresses. Which made alot of people mad, but oh well. That drastic move cut down the spam by about 60%. I allow @gmail.com which they seem to be very good at preventing spam -- So far.

I have also been doing something a bit evil which has cut down some of my spam and has generated a couple of "haters" aka "spammers" that registered and wrote a few nasty posts... I'm gonna try to fight as dirty as possible.

I started collecting tech support email addresses for the various ISP's and government offices. I have been including them is various codes and posts in attempts for the spam bots to pick them up. I managed to piss off a couple of spammers, I guess one got smacked down by some gov office in Canada... He decided to register on my site and try to bad mouth me. Needless to say, he is no longer a issue. The other one threated to fly over to the US and kick my ass.. Guess where that email was redirect too...

They have not been a issue in a long time...

[RZ500]

I have the same problem in my forums, I get people from USA and Rusia using the nick name in the video game name fild using the same and the emails are from a lot of diferent places, and they are skiping the image process and I have to bann each one of that but I get more then 10 a day.

[calorie]

Chances are good that you are getting hit by spam bots. Check out this (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=136604) article. It'll give you an overview of spam prevention options.

[Jurg]

My simple solution is to moderate all posts from new members. You then create a usergroup which doesn't require moderation of posts, and set up auto-promotions so users with at least x posts (mine is at 10 but 1 will do) get promoted to this new group. I have not seen a spammer yet on my forum whose first post wasn't blatant spam.

All you need to do is moderate one (or however many you want) post per new member. You don't even have to mess with their settings as the auto-promotion will do the work for you. This is the least labour-intensive way I've found for keeping users from seeing spam, and it works.

BTW lose the "admin to moderate new accounts" option, it is useless. As you said, unless you know the email address of every potential legitimate new user, you're just wasting your time.

[akanevsky]

The way I solved the problem on my forum is:

a) Set up a copy of Registered Users usergroup with same permissions and save settings, but add "(unmoderated)" in the title.
b) Edit the original Registered Users usergroup and set "follow forum moderation settings" to "off".
c) Create a usergroup promotion from original "registered users" to the secondary "registered users" based on, say, 5 posts.

This way, people who are in registered users usergroup have up to 5 posts will be moderated and after that they will be promoted to the unmoderated usergroup.

[AddHandler]

One thing I would like to know is why the SPAM stuff is left up to the hackers and mod creators..??

This is an expensive script and should come fully loaded with ANTI-SPAM options...
Seeing as EVERY SINGLE SPAM BOT is programmed to hit the VBulletin Scripts every 24 hours or less... VBulletin is probably the most spammed script on the net... so why doesn't it come fully loaded with ANT-SPAM measures...????

[kall]

For one, because the spammers don't just stick to the one method, they change their tactics when prevention methods are put into place.

[blind-eddie]

I have image & email verification on & I have no problems as of yet. Before I turned that on I was hit by spam in my forum. Now I get no spam at all, not even via contact us.

[Adrian Schneider]

Well the newer spam bots can bypass email and image verification... need new methods! Check my profile for a decent anti-spam hack (similar to Psionic Vision's suggestion). It has been catching 100% of spam for me on a few sites, as well as many of my friends' sites.

Another good one is the NoSpam! image verification one. You may want to also look into blocking common (spam) email providers. I would never block yahoo/msn/gmail because a HUGE chunk of people use them.

[fordp]

Anyone know how these spambots can "bypass" mandatory image verification??
Isn't this an obvious vulnarability flaw which needs to be addressed?
I mean, sheesh, I've paid a butt-load of money for this software on all my forums, and now I learn that the biggest selling point it has, doesn't work.

[Swampfox]

Anyone know how these spambots can "bypass" mandatory image verification??
Isn't this an obvious vulnarability flaw which needs to be addressed?
I mean, sheesh, I've paid a butt-load of money for this software on all my forums, and now I learn that the biggest selling point it has, doesn't work.

yeah, they decode captcha in a matter of seconds, its been useless for a long time now

and it has been addressed, there are several other options available, both from vbulletin and modifications available on this site, its something you as an admin/webmaster will need to stay up to speed on or your going to have a hard time with spam.

[dismas]

As with any security method, give people time and they'll find a way around it. Get a question and answer mod or use vB's default one.

[UncoderMom]

I turned on the question and answer mod and it stopped mine. I use the VB default one.

question like

what is 3+4+3+2

answer 12

Just an example. LOL