That's great - I think about that every day when I'm banning a few sig spammers. I used to wonder why some would register and then come back days or weeks later to post the spam, then we installed Spam-O-Matic which checks SFS and it became clear, they probably want to create a bunch of accounts before they get listed on SFS.

So, yeah, maybe something like flagging someone who hasn't posted but logs in just to edit their profile? And being able to list users that are somehow "flagged" as possible spammers, showing their posts and profile fields (and maybe lookup in SFS and any users with matching ips). I'd use that.

Even I used to think that all spam is posted by bots and was baffled as to how they can answer the complex questions I was framing. The only explanation that I could come up with was that some human was opening the door for bots to post spam. But I was wrong even there.

As I devloped more and more complex countermeasures to combat spam, I could see them resisting and trying to counter may antispam measures .. live. I literally had live battles with them. I even traced to where most of the human spammers come from - China, India and Nigeria.

In any case I finally won. I now know how to completely defeat all types of spam and despite all the efforts of all the spammers, they havent been able to post a single spam post on my forums for years. And no .. I dont moderate registrations or even ask new members to solve a captcha.

I hope to write a article on my experiences sometime.

Have you tried this? It is guaranteed to reduce bot spam to nothing (make sure all of the bot accounts are deleted before installing this to get the best results).

Wonderful :rolleyes: You know, this forum is where we help each other with things like this.

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Well, that didn't work, even the spammers know an answer to the custom profile.

It will work if you use regexp to ensure that the word is written correctly, i use this ^[A-Za-z]{2}[,A-Za-z ]*$ in one of my profile fields to make sure users enter only letters in any case they wish, i want my users to enter a lcation in this fashion London, England, this particular expression will not allow them to enter London England, LondonEngland or London-England but will allow London, take a look at rexexp http://www.php.net/manual-lookup.php...ion=preg-match or search the next for it and build your own :)

Yes, I will expedite the work on my article. The only thing I fear is that once spammers know of my antispam system, they may take countermeasures.

All of these problem solving anti-spam measures like questions, captchas etc ... will only stop bots. They will not stop human spammers. For human spam you need entirely different anti-spam measures.

Well, that's true, but we are not really looking for another Q&A, where a precise answer is required. We already have 2 Q&A, this is just a custom profile field to see if the answer makes sense. They could answer "I dunno" or ""Not sure" and still be ok. With the two Q&A as mentioned above, I think it's enough of a hurdle for real new members to jump :)

Fair enough. I'm sure the turds who manage the spam factories read these forums. I know I read theirs. Maybe it would be better for you not to write this in public.

The mod I linked in the previous post and my signature stops human spammers. :)

Yes, thanks, I'm not interested in charging for membership at this point.

Thanks for sharing that. Even if it cost 49 cents [only once] for visitors to register and put money in your pocket, you still would not implement an extremely effective anti-spam measure? Well, any ranting from you past this is pointless; you just don't want that spam gone badly enough, eh? ;)