Having issues with Spam? This is what I did on my forums.

[clarkstoncracke]

I'm sure every admin has had at least one dealing with a spammer. Normally they come from odd countries, and they sure like to sell Viagra!

I have one forum in particular that grew extremely fast, and is very very embedded in the search engines. It receives thousands of hits a day from Google and Yahoo alone.

Well, of course this makes it easy for Mr. Spammer to find the site simply by including "VBULLETIN" in his google/yahoo search.

I was spending hours, literally HOURS each night pouring through the new users, checking IP's, and cross referencing their emails to make sure they were legit before approving them.

I have since 100% eliminated every single spammer, and it took less then 10 minutes.

1st rule, USE IMAGE VERIFICATION!
Make sure you have Random font, random slant, random size, and random color TURNED ON!

2nd rule, USE THIS MOD!
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=133937
Very easy to setup. I use simple questions such as 1+2=? When you make your answers, make sure you use all choices. The answer to 1+2= would be 3 and three.

IMO, this is the best mod ever released for vbulletin, and it should be integrated into vbulletin on all new releases.

3rd rule, (some may disagree) Do not use email verification.

This became a huge burden on my end. Some email servers do not allow unapproved emails to come in. Especially education servers. This means the user will not get the email, then they will "send email to administrator" and I have to track down who they are, what their screen name was, and manually verify them. I'm lazy, that takes too much time.

In lieu of using email verification, I turned on registration email. After they register, Vbulletin automatically sends an email out to them saying "Welcome to ****.com" I don't care if they respond, but it does two things. It leaves the website address in their inbox, in case they forget what forum they signed up for, most most importantly it tells me if their address is good.

Each day, I check the outgoing message inbox for bounced back emails. If I see one, I simply go and delete the account if the email address looks false.


Hope this helps, and I will try to clean this post up and make it look cleaner. I just wanted to share my experiences of what works, because a month ago I was going crazy, and now I have zero spam.