Why does vbulletin atract spam?

[TigerC10]

Originally Posted by nexialys

activate email verification cut the spam from 95%... people don't use it because they hate to bother their members... sorry, but if you do not do the effort, you have spam anyway.

Well, vBulletin used to have a problem with the random code that was sent through e-mails for activation. It was actually a predictable number, I think this got fixed in 3.7.4 and 3.6.8 PL1. This made vBulletin slightly more susceptable to spambots.

Originally Posted by BlueNinjaGo

And block e-mail addresses like .ru and other popular spam bot e-mail addresses.

Originally Posted by dmknights

are all emails that contain mail.ru spammers?

A large number of .ru domain e-mail addresses are used for spam because the Russian internet/mail laws are far more relaxed than the rest of the world. Because it's out of the jurisdiction of the rest of the world, they pretty much can't be penalyzed for breaking any other country's laws.

It's sad, really, because one of my good friends is Russian and has a real .ru e-mail address because he's proud of being from Russia. However, half of the websites he visits block his e-mail address because of all of the spammers that use it.

Originally Posted by guile09

I just thnk vbulletin should ship with multiple lines of defense. As it is right now, you can choose 1 form of spam prevention. I want to make it harder for spammers to get in, and harder for them to spam if they do.

It does ship with multiple lines of defense.

1. E-mail activation prevents a large number of spambots from being able to activate and post ads.
2. Image Verification and reCAPTCHA is built into vBulletin, under the "Human Verification Options". Though, reCaptcha is better than the regular image verification.
3. Ability to ban known spam e-mail addresses (like @*.ru) from being able to register.

These methods are pretty reliable. But, the problem with including defense measures against spam, is that the spambot programmers will start attacking those lines of defense. If Jelsoft leaves the spam prevention mods as mods instead of including them in the product, then the programmers don't program for the mods in mind - and get foiled. Can you dig it?