My first spammer!
 

Well my forum has just appeared on google this morning and to celebrate the occasion my first spammer joined the forum! lol! Wasn't difficult to spot even for a novice like me with this email address: lol@naf.bee.pl

Anyway this has made me realize that I haven't really addressed the issue of security on my forum. So I was wondering if someone could help me by answering the following:

*What is the best way of securing your forum against spammers?
*Is there a list of notorious spamming IP addresses available so I can block them?
*What is the best security protection in general for a vBulletin forum? Is there some sort of security product you can upload?

I'm running 3.8.4 so not sure how that effects things?

Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you :)

When our new site went live we got spam. I change from using reCAPTCHA to Question & Answer Verification and not had one bit of spam after the change.

:)

make sure you offer a good question at the very beginning. Also, make a new profile question and reqiure it to be filled in at registration...(something to do with the forum).

Also...if you have any doubts run their IP addy and email at www.stopforumspam.com

I fixed a 3.5 forum last night with 16,000 spammers. The forum had 2 real posts.
yay. :)

The only way I was able to deal with the ongoing spam issue was to moderate new members. It's a pain for both admins and new members but it's the best way that I've found to work. I set the welcome pm to explain why and adjusted the permissions so they can access just about everything except being to post or reply to messages.

Human Verification Questions.

Very easy to set up (built into vb) and I have had 0 problems.

Human Verification Questions.

Example:

Whats the opposite of hot?

(answer cold)

stops robot spam 100%

lol! Bet that was fun!

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That's what we do. We also use a modification that runs their ip against existing ip's, & runs their email and user name in google.

Hi,

Since I'm using this plugin: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=132482
I haven't received any spam registration.

there is also a list of blacklisted email domains you should use. I'm not sure where I found this list, either here or on the vb.com. Try to do a search.

Good luck!

as everybody said.. human verification.. random question is the way to go..
i have successfully stopped 99.9% of spams through that..

Hehe until spam software starts using Wolfram Alpha's API:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...site+of+hot%3F

it sucks, just stumped it with this...

Is it cold or hot in the word hotpussy?

Had my first spammer last week coming from a proxy. Beefed up security, haven't gotten any since.

Ah I like that option! I nice easy way of dealing with the problem! Thank you! :)

Thank you! I found www.stopforumspam.com and copied all the spam IP and email addresses across to my forum so that's a lot of people spammers that are now banned! Lol!

Bloody hell! That's crazy! It must have been a nightmare to fix! Do you mind me asking how long it took to get that out of hand? Like did that many spammpers appear over months or years?

Now that seems like an excellent idea as well! Thank you! :)

I think I'll try changing to question & answer verification first and if that doesn't work for me I'll try it your way. :)

Thanks for the positive feedback on them. :)

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Oooh thank you! I was just about to ask for some examples of questions! :)

Sounds like a good modification... do you mind me asking if it's still available?

Just had a goosey at that mod & doesn't seem to work well with 3.8 from what I've read :(

But I'll search now for blacklisted domains - thanks for the advice. :)

Thank you for your feedback! I really do think this is the option for me. :)

I have try with Question & Answer Verification and reCAPTCHA and it kill spam but when I remove it and put just simple picture new registrations jump 150% (2% was spammers ) so I was thinking what to do and as Trip already said moderate new members is the best way.

Make new user group where will be your real members with 1+ posts and put moderate posts for current default user group. After that go and make promotions that after 1 post user from default user group is promoted to group where is you real members.
For every new user you will need to moderate only first post, after you aprove it he will be in regular user group and will continue to post normal.

Hope it help :)

Enhanced Image Verification Mod & reCAPTCHA. No spammers at all!