Spammers just keep on Coming - I need HELP please

[Eric HRF]

ok where do I start....My Forum is basically under attack with spam bots and spammers and It's getting out of control:cry: I'm not sure what to do anymore, I've almost tried everything I can think of.

My forum started being attacked almost 2 months ago and it's getting worse. My forum doesn't normally get so many new registrations in one week so that's how I noticed it along with porn and other bad new threads posted by these spammers.

If I new where the 'source' of all this was coming from or how it started, I might be able to fix it. Any ideas here?

I'm also on a few other forums, yet none of them are being attacked like my forum. One forum isn't vbulletion but has over 3000 members.

I have copied down every new members username, IP and email address into notepad as they register and have a ton of them!! I have gone through all of them and blocked their IP's and their email address's and then deleted them.

I then was getting new registrations with gmail, yahoo address's and this was just going too far, so I did a search on one of the yahoo email address's and came up with a site, that was great! Click HERE It gave me a list of Spambots IPs and emails address's that were spamming a few forums..the list is very long! A lot of the IPs and emails matched some of the ones I have banned already, but I am shocked at how many there are....

I then made my own spreadsheet and copied all those IPs into the spreadsheet and put them into accending order, I then wrote all the emails into the same spreadsheet. As the SpamBot site list increases I add them to my spreadsheet and add them to my banning options. I have copied that whole list of IPs and put them into my Banning Options/Ban IPS and did the same for the emails including partial emails. I have over 100 of IPs and email address's being banned!

I also turned on these in Registration Options
1: Moderate New Members - YES
2: Email Address to Notify About New Members - YES with my email
3: Verify Email address in Registration - YES

But the thing with this is...I can't tell if a new registration (email and IP that isn't already blocked) is a spammer/spambot or a person actually wanting to benefit from my forum and it's VERY time consuming. I also don't want a heap of registered users on my forum that are spammers, that sit there waiting for email moderation, it just clogs up the forum.

Yet I'm still getting spammers and spambots registering! I meed some serious help please, I can't spent 1-2hrs every day moderating all these new registrations and banning most of them. My forum has been great before this, the members keep it going smoothly, I'm there to help them out with any questions they ask and to also keep the forum up and running for them.

KiwiJenn
Running (vBulletin 3.5.3) - My Forum I'm referring to isn't the one in the siggi.
I'm Partners with Eric HRF on several Forums

[xtreme-mobile]

im having the same problems as you mate

kep getting bits posting sking who they should contact fo link excahnge and they keep posting it again and again

[ART]

won't image verification do the trick?

[xtreme-mobile]

doesnt seem to be no

[Eric HRF]

I have that on, and some visual impaired people that want to register to use the forum have to get me to register them as they can't see the small print.

Originally Posted by ART

won't image verification do the trick?

[amykhar]

The spam killer mod and the mod to not let people post links until they've got at least 15 posts pretty much nipped spam in the bud for us. The rare spammers we get are humans who post nonsense to get to their 15 posts and then post the link, which we immediately zap.

[optrex]

I have image verification on
I require users to accept the email notification
They then go into a moderation queue to be accepted, before posts are seen

I also insist they complete a mandatory profile field (in my case location and the country flag hack). This means the bot cannot usually cope with the mandatory field and/or the hack field and registration fails.

If its a human they usually put a country flag that doesn't match the location - this then gets binned by the admins.

[Eric HRF]

How do you set that up in registration or in Admin?

I also insist they complete a mandatory profile field (in my case location and the country flag hack). This means the bot cannot usually cope with the mandatory field and/or the hack field and registration fails.

I'm still needing a solution here though...

[DimensionZero]

This has become a bit of a problem on our forum as well.

I started off banning IPs and subnets with .htaccess but since it's impossible to stay ahead of the curve, came here looking for a solution. That list of IPs is great! I've added them to the collection but I also found an add-on here called Akismet Anti-Spam which I've now installed and will see how that works out for us.

[Eric HRF]

That looks good and would help with spam posts. I have a mod set now that requires a user to have at least 15 post before they can upload images, or post hyperlinks.

My real problem now is I need to stop spammers from registering, is there something to help with this?

thanks