Huge sudden increase in spammer/fake account registration?

[OrionDesigns]

My forum is: http://www.floridacarclub.com/forums.php

In the past 2 days I've had at least 100 new fake members...it's gotten so bad I had to change it to a moderation queue.

I haven't had this problem for 3 years, what could have caused this, and how can I fix it?

--------------------

Also - I'm running vBulletin 3.6.0 - is it worth it for me to upgrade to 3.8.0? My biggest worry is that I have some custom hacks installed and a custom skin...I'm afraid everything won't transfer over perfectly.

[nexialys]

having products and custom codes on your site is one question, if they are all in the products format, without files edits, you are safe for upgrades.

for the style, you can upgrade and then compare the edited templates to see the changes... you just have to be used to the template engine, it takes 10 minutes to wrap and upgrade of templates usually, between 3.6 and 3.7 ... because there is no 3.8 yet...

for the fake accounts, they are human-generated, so even an upgrade can't do it... your site is popular, that's why... it's a period, lately ALL the sites, not only vBulletin, received these spammers... they are paid humans who post their links for 1$ per site or something like that... they register as humans, so you can't do a thing, just moderate all new posts...

[Lynne]

If you take a look at vb.com and even here, you'll see this is hitting several sites so there are many threads to read about what site owners are doing to combat this.

[74corvette]

I've had a bunch as well. Is there a way to make it so they dont even show as a user ? I dont want the user name listed at all, anywhere.

[Janfri]

I've had a bunch as well. Is there a way to make it so they dont even show as a user ? I dont want the user name listed at all, anywhere.

I have about 10 spam registrations daily, although image verification and manual moderation is turned on. Not all registrations are listed among the new users to moderate, so I have to delete them one by one. How is it possible to bypass the moderation feature?
Cheers
Janfri
BTW, is it possible to reset the user count, as the spam registrations occupy lots of user IDs? My new forum only has 27 members, but because of the spammers, member number 28 will probably have the user ID 128.

[EWGF]

What to do: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1632073&postcount=3

[zeus_r6]

My site is getting hammered with them too :(

[org knopper]

Even both my sites are they just register and open threads with porn contents in specific forum n then go quite for 2 3 days and den chose another forum and start posting again :)) Strange !

[jkcerda]

I switched to question/answer on the registrations, seems to have stopped, I would like to know how to make them answer more than 1 question.

[SpanishHarlem]

Its gotten bad on my site too.

[Janfri]

I don't know if it is the solution, but I checked "Random images" in the Image Verification Options and did not have any bot registration since yesterday, after having 10 the night before. Hopefully this will at least reduce spam. But I still wonder how new user moderation can be bypasssed. About 50% of the at least 40 spammers on my site in the last week bypassed the moderation.