Spammers

[swampysc]

I am very new to Vbulletin 4.22

I am having a terrible time with spammer registrations.

Is there a mod or anything available to help with the situation.

What does everyone suggest please.

[Max Taxable]

This will stop most of the spam bots that auto-register:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=294633

This gets alot of human spammers because they still use early IE:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=268208

This stops registration by any device on blacklisted host names: (You compile the list. I have a good one I will give you via PM. This is effective against both human spammers and auto bot spammers)

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=279110


NONE of the above use captchas, puzzles, questions or other such nonsense that merely annoys legitimate users, and have been rendered obsolete anyway for the most part, by autospam programs such as XRumer.

[TheLastSuperman]

Try some info I have outlined here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=276547

[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by TheLastSuperman

Try some info I have outlined here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=276547

Outstanding article.

I would only add that all of the timer based anti-spam mods pretty much render things like Spam-O-Matic useless, because they catch and stop the bots before they ever get to the SoM level. SoM can be good for the human spammers though. But with the Mods I posted here, SoM really won't have a heck of alot to do.

I'd mention also that the Q&A, captchas, puzzles, moderation of new members, email verification, all of these annoy or flat out run off, legitimate humans and do little these days to stop spam. IMO they aren't worth using since their effectiveness has eroded to the point of uselessness.

Important in your article though - stopping spam has to be a multi-layered approach. There is no magic bullet, no one panacea, and you will still get the occasional spammer who slips through the wall no matter how well you're protected. It's a ongoing war.

[TheLastSuperman]

^ Honestly Max adding in 2-3 new profile fields using images and regular expression have cut down spam registrations on several sites I admin on by 99%.

What I do is make anywhere from 2-3 (on some sites like my own I did 4, overboard perhaps but been spam registration free for quite a while) new images, I make it slogans or even take the sites logo and blur all letters but one, then using regular expressions in the profile field ask the user "Please enter in the letter not shown in the picture above" and they can enter in just one letter lower or upper case so for example if in the image it shows an "N" the regular expression would be ^[nN]$ so they can enter in "n" or "N" and it will accept the answer otherwise it will not and having that one field incorrect will deny registration. *New profile field must be set to "Filed Required: Yes, at registration and profile updating" & set the default value to be an incorrect answer so if the spambot simply tries to blindly submit the page yet one more way for it to fail.