Spammers

[rbgrn]

I found out what has happened. XRumer 5.0 was released which supports advanced Captcha defeat including Gmail. I knew it'd happen eventually but it's pretty obnoxious when you have multiple sites that all start getting nailed.

Here's a slashdot article that talks about it. I switched my forums to recaptcha as it doesn't seem to support that at the moment but I think we're in for a serious cat and mouse game. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/02/1415205

[punchbowl]

yeah recapcha worked for me. From that slashdot page "Soon, the only thing that will be able to read a CAPTCHA will be automated spam bots"

lol

[tjpeople]

About 40 spam account last few days.

Aswell as "Man" in the bio they all seem to use an ICQ number, however it varies.

Have turned on reCaptCha hopefully that will help.

[iogames]

XRumer is a Windows program that posts forum spam with the aim of boosting search engine rankings. It has been claimed that the program is able to bypass techniques commonly used by many websites to deter automated spam, such as account registration, CAPTCHAs, and e-mail activation before posting. The program makes heavy use of a database of known open proxies in an attempt to make it more difficult for administrators to block posts.

In addition, the software can avoid the suspicions of forum administrators by first registering to make a post in the form of a question which mentions the spam product ("Where can I get...?"), before registering another account to post a spam link which mentions the product. The side effect of these innocent-looking posts is that helpful forum visitors may Google for the product and themselves post a link to help out, thus bolstering the product's Google stats without falling afoul of forum posting policies.

So the problem is real, isn't not the imagination of a few forum owners but a treat that must be addressed

[GSeybold]

Is there a link on Vb.org to post known and new spammers as they come in. I think this would be helpful to everyone if it doesn't already exist. Would be nice to check it everyday for new items to pre-ban and ward of any new problems ahead of time. Thank you

[komirad]

Originally Posted by jkcerda

different time zones,-12 , +8 , -3:30

Haha I am at GMT +8. Singapore.

[i156]

I was also getting them to all my sites that run vbulletin on them. I just finished upgrading them all to the latest VB and setting them up using recaptcha and that seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks for now.

[goshalim]

Last week I updated my VB from 3.6.8 to 3.7.3
In more that 5 day , I had more than 40 spammer and they stated that they are from CHINA.

How can we prevent this ?
Any good solutions ?

--------------- Added [DATE]1223046126[/DATE] at [TIME]1223046126[/TIME] ---------------

Originally Posted by tjpeople

About 40 spam account last few days.

Aswell as "Man" in the bio they all seem to use an ICQ number, however it varies.

Have turned on reCaptCha hopefully that will help.

ME too the same as you

What can we do ??

[Caddyman]

Originally Posted by tjpeople

About 40 spam account last few days.

Aswell as "Man" in the bio they all seem to use an ICQ number, however it varies.

Have turned on reCaptCha hopefully that will help.

i had this exact situation as well, on my sports forum....

[jkcerda]

I still have many trying to register, I shut down regstrations till I plce some of the hacks recommended here