How can I get rid of already registered spammers?
 

It's too late. I have a forum with hundreds of bots registered. Now I have to clean it up. Is there any tutorial how to do that? As far as I have found out, there are tutorials to prevent spam registrations. But how about to clean forum from already registered spammers?

Unless you're really bothered by the member count being higher than the number of humans who signed up for your forum in good faith, why bother? Just ban the spammers and be done with it. From everything that I've read, the extra records don't slow down your forum any.

For me it's a security risk. How do you find out who's a spammer and who not?

Well, a spammer is a member who continuously posts random messages, so you'd know :).

Problem is that I have hundreds of people registrated. All robots. So there's a list out there with login / password information about how to post in my forum. Do not like this idea.


So I am searching for a solution for this. Banning each member on my own is that time consuming as there is not even a user inline tool - as far as I am aware of.

Well if someone decides to come along and post something then you can just ban them straight away and delete their thread. To be honest though all the boards I have been on don't normally get spammers coming back. Once the bot has posted the thread you don't normally see them again, if you do just do a perm. ban on the account.
Like you said yourself its a bit too late, only advice really would be to ensure that from now you ban the bots as soon as you see their thread. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there is a way to identify the bots from real users so I doubt you will be able to find anything to enable you to delete them.

Do you have CAPTCHA enabled to help keep them out in the first place?

Bots decode those easily, easier than humans can probably, I turned it off on my forum since it doesnt do any good

I deleted all the spammers accounts that registered on my forum, they arent that hard to pick out, usually a very strange name, they also will usually have an out of the country IP address and will have selected their default time zone as gmt-12, there is a mod to deny registrations if they select that time zone, since I installed it back in february I have yet to have a spambot register

That would be my hack :).

I have to tell you, I was provided a code on the forums at vbulletin.com that stopped spamming on my forum.

I had uncontrollable spamming but now I dont have a single one.

All I did was add a question to the registration page.

It simply says......................."what is the first letter in the word "Florida"".

They simply answer the question at registration and all spamming is gone!

There's a hack called "NoSpam!" that does this.

The only problem with modifications that ask questions, is there may be users who are legitimately unable to answer them. Whether it due to diminuished capacity or language barriers. CAPTCHA's are international and involves little more than simply typing the letters you see on the screen.

However, if you have no desire for anyone with any of the previous detriments on your forum, you have no reason to concern yourself with those issues.

It was for these reasons that I incorporated reCAPTCHA into vBulletin, to replace the default CAPTCHA. It's whole existence is based upon the fact that OCR systems cannot read the text. But, again, this would only be useful if your trying to attract a diverse userbase rather than a specific one.

Whichever route you go, just be careful not to go overboard. I've (attempted to) register on a few sites where there were like 30 spam-checks in place.. once I saw that, I just opted to not even register to begin with. *shrug*

Try and find a common link between lots of spam accounts, and Prune users based on that?