Spammers!

[vbresults]

How many spam bots register on your vBulletin 4 site on an average day? If you have third-party anti-spam plugins, how many got in daily before installing them, and after? We're doing research on vBulletin spam and if you'll share that would be great.

Thank you

[In Omnibus]

I had a few a month who slipped through other modifications before installing Spammers Suck!

Now I have Zero.

[gajinoz]

I had 40 or 50 a day until I installed Spammers Suck, now I don't seem to be getting any at all, just the occasional "human" ones that get through.

[WorldCraft]

I get quite a bit of attempted registrations daily. But simple Q/A verification and Spam-O-Matic work wonders. Only 2-3 a month do I actually need to ban and clean up posts.

[DAMINK]

I get about 150 a day banned on conditions of stopforumspam.
I get perhaps 20 a day trip up on other methods i use.
Those 2 alone and the heavy moderation we place on new users = 0 spam!
I get perhaps 2 or 3 bots get through and register but with the limits in place they dont post.
And if they did they are non visible posts so cant be scraped anyway.
Currently its me 1 and spammers 0.
How long that will last lolz. Who knows but it gives me a bit of fun to try beat them.

[Christos Teriakis]

Never had spam as I'm using the Questions/Answers as human verification. I've around 50 questions like: "Starting from Monday which is the 4+1 day (Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday)".

Happy New Year to all
Chris

[Carnage]

I had about 100 registrations per day until I added an 'are you a spambot' question to the registration form. This cut it down to about 10. From there I've banned a lot of isp's (esp chineese ones) and the spam seems to be down to a more manageable trickle.

To get rid of the rest of the spam, I've been working on a new modification Spam****** (spam censor) which is intended to block spam by the post contents using similar techniques to those spam assasin uses on email spam. Realistically, content based filtering is the best way of dealing with spam, once a forum has configured the filters any post which isn't 'on topic' will get flagged as spam.

[Paul M]

On Cable Forum we barely get more than a couple a month - the main reason being that as a UK forum, for a UK ISP, we block registrations from any IP that is not UK based.

[John Lester]

These are the #'s over a 2 year period when we moved hosts.

Spam-O-Matic Statistics

18481 Spammers Denied Registration
204 Spammy Posts Automatically Moderated


Also have installed Spammers suck and have the emails turned off so no telling how many are blocked by that super simple super awesome script


We have email verification off (which is why the # denied by spam-o is high) and Q and A verification on registration.


We also have restricted the registered user group from posting pics, links, having avatars, having profile pics, and having signatures.


No visitor messaging allowed for anyone.


My team has to deal with maybe 3 human spammers a month.

Forgot to mention we also have a plug-in that limits the amount of periods you can have in an email for registering (that's stopped 2 legit members in the 4 months or so we've been using it).

Also forgot to mention that I have the following email address blocked in the ACP .info .tv .ru

[MySaltyreef]

40565 Spammers Denied Registration

238 Spammers Permanently Banned

185 Spammers submitted to StopForumSpam

272 Spammers submitted to Akismet

627 Spammy Posts Automatically Moderated

is what it says yet we were manually removing around 30 spammers a day still, installed spammers suck yesterday and not one has got through, got security questions in, moderate all new registrations, what helped us is having a custom profile field that needs to be answered correctly which a spammer cant do