How to block these Human Spammers?

[induslady]

Ours is an Online Community for Indian Women.

Of late, for the past couple of weeks we have these spammers (humans NOT bot registrations) spamming our forums, particularly a local forum, with "Call Girls" info.

We are fighting hard to crack a way to keep these spammers away. The problem is they are not posting any external links, so that they will get auto-moderated and thrown way.

They are not following any particular email/username pattern in their registrations for us to ban registrations coming from such email.

Also, they have floating IPs, so not able to ban by IPs too. In fact, if we block the IPs they come from, many genuine users will get thrown away because they seem to share the IPs in that network. Also most of the time their IPs are our CDN (content delivery network) IPs.

The ONLY pattern we see is the word "call girls", "escort" and they are mostly targeting one specific local forum we have.

If I block these texts, they are only going to make these text/phrases to change into **** in the posts. But in no way going to prevent the posts.

Quite challenging spammers!!

Is there a way to block them and completely keep them away from our site's forums?

[ForceHSS]

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=248042
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=289463
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=268208
install them all

[John Lester]

Instead of banning them, send them to tachy. That way they won't know that nobody can see their posts

acp->banning options

Scroll down to the global ignore and add their userid

[Spangle]

Set up a Q&A ( Question and Answer) for registration, but ask a question that is relative to the forum, and one that only Indian women would know the answer to.

The biggest problem you have with that is that most of the human spammers are coming from India, they are paid very small amounts to spam sites, 5$ per 5000 links/sites.

So you will need to come up with something, if membership take up is slow, you could use admin verification, you can easily spot a spammer because of the user name, but it can be very labour intensive for the admin.

Q & A is your best defence, if yu can think of a question that men wouldn't know the answer to !!