Spam Accounts are Killing Me!
 

I have a small forum with about 2000 members and up to this point have been manually activating accounts. As of this week, the spam accounts have skyrocketted and I need to install some kind of MOD to help. What's the general concensous on the best MOD to use? I looked through the list and the multiple image captcha seemed decent, but I was hoping to get some opinions on what's out there...

Thanks,
Dan

Use Q&A instead of capthcha. There are a few threads stickied at the top of the forums over on vbulletin.com on how to combat spam.

Thanks. I didn't think I was the only one. There must have been some New Year's resolutions added to some spammers.... "1) spam more!".

Dan

Same thing happened at our site starting Monday. This ZDBlock thing: http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php seems to have helped a lot, although we did have some problems with members getting blocked when trying to use the the site from their phones.

Also I think that thing might work by completely blocking access from certain countries, which may or may not be something you want to do. (ETA:..although it is configurable, and maybe it doesn't block entire countries by default, I'm not sure).

I just manually activate accounts, the spammers give up eventually.

This is what I've been doing all along, but I'm getting over 100 bogus accounts a day now and it will get out of hand really fast. I'm also considering shutting down registration all together and directing them to a page asking to send an email to me with a username suggestion, then I would manually create the account. I only get about 2-3 new users a week on my forum.

Unfortunately, everyone's site is different so there is no one-size-fits-all for a spam solution. You need to look at all the options and decide which ones would be best for you.

I use the auto-delete plugin...the peeps register and get usernames, but are deleted after 5 days of non-compliance. So no noticeable effect. I did have over 30 new user accounts added just today, so it's a huge annoyance as far as that's concerned.

Us the stopforumspam mod. It works like a champ.