NEED HELP: How To Determine A Spammer
 

Hi. I'm completely new to this forum stuff and we just begun creating our layout and categories for the forum. I noticed for 3 consecutive days there has been visitors who registered and posted 'medical topics' on our blog page that are somehow grammatically wrong and out of nowhere. I checked their log-in info and they are using the SAME IP addresses from UK and a domain 'redstation.com'. I'm not a technical person. Out of doubt I banned them permanently but I'm assuming this will continue if I still don't know how to set permissions or determine spam or something like that. PLEASE help me. Thanks in advance. >Marie

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I posted here. I need info on how to determine spammers. Please somebody reply :confused:

You can do a number of things to try to prevent spammers from registering. One is to enable "question and answer" human verification for registration. You only need a few simple questions for it to be effective. (Recaptcha doesn't work as well - spammers have some automated way to get past it, apparently).

There are also mods that you can install that will check the registration info against a database like SFS (stop forum spam) and deny registration to known spammers.

In the end, I think it's a trade-off of how easy you want to make it for people to register vs. how many spammers you'll get. Some people claim to have zero spammers registering, but I think they do things like completely denying registration from certain countries, which may or may not work for you.

Here's a article about anti-spammer methods: www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=276547 , it's probably a good idea to read that and maybe look at some of the things it links to.

1. activate human verification at registration
2. activate moderation of new users
3. when moderating new registrations check ip, nickname and e-mail here
http://www.stopforumspam.com/search

reduced number of spammers registering by 99% this way

<a href="https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=176481" target="_blank">https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=176481</a> - very glad we installed this thing, seriously...

Thank you all very much! I'll go ahead and try your recommendations.

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Is vbStopForumSpam not available for 4.2? We purchased the latest vBulletin 4.2 package. I've read that it's only for vBulletin 3.x.x up to 4.0 Gold. If not, what mods are released for 4.2? Thanks in advance