Spam profiles created and traffic sent to them

[phreak79]

Hi all,

The forum I run has had real problems with spam lately and I'm at my wits end. The problem seems to be spam members are signing up with spam links in their signature area. They then send a truck load of traffic to their spam profile pages.

According to the front page stats I have anywhere from 200-400 users on at once, and no way do I have that many users. It's bringing my forum down. I've added all of the ip's from stopforumspam to my htaccess and have done the same to the vBulletin spam control panel but neither seem to be working.

They also seem to be bypassing the spam protection upon sign up. I have new members answer a question, such as what is x letter on my logo image, so I don't know whether they are humans or clever bots but they are getting on.

Has anyone else had this problem?

[Lynne]

Do a search on "spam" in this forum. There are several threads discussiong spam issues and the different things admins do to stop it.

[phreak79]

I've done that. I'm already running reCaptcha with human question and have banned a host of ip addresses, but still they come.

[Lynne]

There have also been a ton of mods listed that are successful. Different sites find success with different mods. I've mentioned several times that the Is Bot blocks about 100 spammers a day for my site. We rarely get spam any more.

[phreak79]

I've looked in the 3.8 mod section and can't find any Is Bot mod. The latest version seems to be for 3.6. Is that still going to be safe?

[Lynne]

The 3.6 mod works on 3.8. But, like I said, different sites find success with different mods so I can't guarantee that that is the best mod for your site.

[phreak79]

Willing to give anything a go. Thanks.

[ssslippy]

A custom captcha aka one with a custom backgrounds and custom fonts along with a question and the time detection is the best u can do.

However human assisted bots will break anything. The latest thing Ive seen is an automated bot that creates a blank album.