How to deal with spammers and email grabbers

[Viks]

Hi everyone.
I am posting this to discuss this major issue for forum administrators and moderators. NO Forum is safe from spammers.

I've also noticed that as the page rank of my forum has gone up in search engines - i've been getting lot of spammers lately. Email Grabbers is another issue... people register and then try to grab email addresses such msn/yahoo/etc saved on personal profile.

I wonder how big is this problem for you.. and what do you do to deal with it.

hope to hear your comments/suggestions.

[tinkerbell]

When I managed a forum for an autosurf between march 05 and march 06, spamming and email grabbers were huge problems, especially since we were getting 1000+ posts a day.

With spamming, the only solution I came up with was to stay on top of it and if anyone has any other suggestions I would gladly welcome them.

Email grabbers on the other hand now I own a forum with 2 others has been cut off because I have edited out the IM options in profiles. Members can still contact each other however it has to be via a contact center which is ran by the admin.

This may be inconvenient however from past experience worth it. The forum is also geared for young members so I felt I had to do it this way anyway, cutting off the email grabbers was an added bonus LOL.

Karen

[Viks]

So basically for spam you keep cleaning up spam as much as you can. thats tough especially if one does not have a big team of moderators to manage the posts.

Email grabbers are my biggest headache right now. Once they register - they are able to see yahoo/ICQ/msn/AIM email addresses of users in their postbit and user profiles. I do not think there is anyway to disable that in VB - this is becoming a major issue on my forum as I get 10 - 30 registration every week only to grab emails... one such domain is cashette.com!!

I wish there was a better way to deal with this problem.

[tinkerbell]

I sympathise Viks I know it can be a nasty problem to deal with and can hurt your forum.

You can alter the template in the admin cp and delete the options for IM ids in a members profile or you can have your settings so that profiles are not available for viewing and the IM id options dont appear at the top of members posts.

I realise that both of these options are drastic but you can always put them back at a later date once things calm down. You will also find your members will suport you if you let them know what you are doing and why and that it isnt a permanent move.

Karen

ps if you would like help from me or other members why not post here https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=97

[adwade]

Originally Posted by tinkerbell

You can alter the template in the admin cp and delete the options for IM ids in a members profile or you can have your settings so that profiles are not available for viewing and the IM id options dont appear at the top of members posts.

Good idea. I never thought of that.

Along these same lines I've been reading how others have fought off such problems and tripped across these this website at http://www.neilgunton.com/doc/spambot_trap and he has some good info/ideas. Especially his references at the end of the article.

[ChavMagnet]

when typing a email in a post write it like this youremail [at] gmail.com this helps against programs ect.