Spammers attacking one specific forum topic

[chrisrouse]

I've been monitoring the spam attacks on our forums. It looks like whatever the first forum is in the second category that we have is what they go after. I've confirmed that be re-arranging the forum order as well as adding a new forum just to catch everything.

The category name is "General Topics". Is there something about the name that draws spam to that?

This is just since late last night.

[jonii]

Send me a PM to help you.

[cellarius]

Send me a PM to help you.

Jonii, don't get me wrong - but out of your 4 posts here three ask other people to send you a pm for you to help them. On the other hand, you have not once helped out w/o this request.

Call me paranoid - but I find this suspicious. I have no idea what you're asking from those users in pn, or why you find it better to not just post (so others with the same problem can profit, too), but still...

[ozzy47]

Yeah if he truly wants to help, that's cool, but a new user with 4 posts, only asking members to pm him does seem suspicious.

Before giving anyone your information, or committing to a paid / unpaid job, you should read this, Protection Recommendations (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=69734)

[WEBDosser]

does your website verify email on registration?

[Max Taxable]

You're allowing spambots to register and post?

--------------- Added 1380910495 at 1380910495 ---------------

does your website verify email on registration?That's been bypassed by botnets for a long time now, it's a useless feature completely. Not only do they get legitimate yahoo, gmail, hotmail and other email addresses by bypassing those site's human verification systems, they get the verification code from the pageload, instantly.

[WEBDosser]

You're allowing spambots to register and post?.

That's what I was trying to say.. basically the same thing.

[Max Taxable]

That's what I was trying to say.. basically the same thing.That's what you would ask, if you thought email verification stops botnets. It doesn't.:p

[CAG CheechDogg]

Well I see something that no one else has, in that forum "General Topics" you have "Spam honeypot" , I don't know about you guys but this is definitely going to attract bots that are searching to spam just because they are probably searching to see what it is that "spam honeypots" are doing to try and stop them.

I have said it before, these bots are looking for "keywords" just like search engines do, that is why I do not use anything that fights off spammers.

[Max Taxable]

Well I see something that no one else has, in that forum "General Topics" you have "Spam honeypot" , I don't know about you guys but this is definitely going to attract bots that are searching to spam just because they are probably searching to see what it is that "spam honeypots" are doing to try and stop them.

I have said it before, these bots are looking for "keywords" just like search engines do, that is why I do not use anything that fights off spammers.I simply keep them from registering, I don't care if they are keyword junkies or not.:D

Just curious why anyone would allow them to register and post.

[CAG CheechDogg]

I agree, makes no sense to me, he allows them to register and then names the forum in a way that they would find it easily...very "creepy" eh? lol.....

[Max Taxable]

I agree, makes no sense to me, he allows them to register and then names the forum in a way that they would find it easily...very "creepy" eh? lol.....Definitely confusing - to a rabid, militant anti-spam guy such as myself.

[xenite]

The category name is "General Topics". Is there something about the name that draws spam to that?

This is just since late last night.

The programs that are used to spam forums use template files that tell them what to look for. Most likely the spammers who are trying to get into your forums use templates that restrict posts to a "General [whatever]" forum category because their "self-promotional" crap would stand out in a dedicated topic forum.

Their templates may also target forum categories/names like "for sale", "marketplace", "auctions", etc.

If you hold new registrations for moderation they at least cannot post until you review them.

I consolidate as many IP addresses for filtering as possible, by stripping down IPs to common B-blocks if two or more C-blocks are used.

Most spambots these days are coming in through proxy servers, which are less likely to be used by real people wanting to talk in forums (although given recent privacy concerns that might change but people need to understand there has never been any privacy on the Internet).

So, if you get two spam accounts from IP addresses that look like this:

A.B.1.0
A.B.25.0

I check to see what country A.B.0.0 has been assigned to using a service like IPDB.AT and if it's China or some other Asian country where I'm not likely to attract any real users, I just block all registrations from A.B in the VBulletin block list.

This practice has helped to cut down on robot registrations considerably.

I don't use CAPTCHAs in my forums because there are spam services that feed your CAPTCHA image to a queue, which is reviewed by human users in Asia (or the Philippines -- there is more than one such service). The human users solve the CAPTCHAs in the queues and the robots feed the answers back to the forums.

There is no perfect system to stop forum spam but at the very least you don't have to allow the spammers to get in.

On the other hand, if your honeypot really works (and only the dumbest of spammers would look for "honeypot" forums) then at least your normal users would know not to look in there. You can block that forum in your "robots.txt" so that Bing and Google don't see all the spam links and downgrade your forums for being spam-friendly (and that really happens -- I've worked with several forums that had to clean up the mess and file reconsideration requests).