[axelhols]

Originally Posted by Jeff66

Sometimes spammers are so obvious it would be foolish to wait until they've posted before banning them.

Recently I've had a lot of people register from India, Pakistan and Eastern Europe (I never have any genuine users from those places), who fill in lots of details in their user profile, claiming they're in the UK. A Google search has revealed they've recently registered for hundreds of forums using the same information.
It's just a matter of time before they start spamming all those sites.

Wouldn't it be better to get them blacklisted before they start the spamming?


I've been reporting these people to the SFS database manually, it would be nice if I could do it from within my vBulletin control panel.

No - since this may lead to board admins listing user details for posts they just happen to disagree with or perhaps have some kind of grudge against a certain board member.

As the Internet mail filtering administrators have discovered over the years - defining and identifying SPAM is actually not that straightforward - what is SPAM to one person is legit advertising to another.
To keep things simple we just want to focus on Unsolicited Bulk Emails or Posts (UBE/UBP) - the same advert or advertiser submitting to a large number of multiple recipients. In the case of forums this will be mainly from Spambots and will reflect as multiple entries for the same username/email over a period of time.

For a collaborative Database like StopForumSpam to be meaningful they presumably thus only consider submissions with clear cut 'SPAM' evidence.

Its then up to a plugin like Spam-O-Matic to interpret and make a decision on rejecting a registration based on the information presented there.
But it would not surprise me if this plugin has to be fine tuned in the future with a scoring system perhaps similar to http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SpamAssassin (for SMTP/POP mail) in order to reduce the number of potential false-positives.