Spammers just keep on Coming - I need HELP please

[Roxie]

We've had the same issue over the last few weeks. I have image verification, email verification (which catches a few) and I manually approve all memberships.

Most of the ones registering on my forum use the Jan 1 birthdate. Or they'll have a bunch of spam messages in their registration. So far I only missed ONE out of at least 30.

[Silverstangs]

Spam is a issue on all four of my forums too, I had to disable the Contact us page.. and I always used image verification but that does not seem to stop. I wish there was a hack for Image verification for sending emails.. but I disabled the feature instead. I also STOPPED accepting new registrations from @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com addresses. Which made alot of people mad, but oh well. That drastic move cut down the spam by about 60%. I allow @gmail.com which they seem to be very good at preventing spam -- So far.

I have also been doing something a bit evil which has cut down some of my spam and has generated a couple of "haters" aka "spammers" that registered and wrote a few nasty posts... I'm gonna try to fight as dirty as possible.

I started collecting tech support email addresses for the various ISP's and government offices. I have been including them is various codes and posts in attempts for the spam bots to pick them up. I managed to piss off a couple of spammers, I guess one got smacked down by some gov office in Canada... He decided to register on my site and try to bad mouth me. Needless to say, he is no longer a issue. The other one threated to fly over to the US and kick my ass.. Guess where that email was redirect too...

They have not been a issue in a long time...

[RZ500]

I have the same problem in my forums, I get people from USA and Rusia using the nick name in the video game name fild using the same and the emails are from a lot of diferent places, and they are skiping the image process and I have to bann each one of that but I get more then 10 a day.

[calorie]

Chances are good that you are getting hit by spam bots. Check out this article. It'll give you an overview of spam prevention options.

[Jurg]

My simple solution is to moderate all posts from new members. You then create a usergroup which doesn't require moderation of posts, and set up auto-promotions so users with at least x posts (mine is at 10 but 1 will do) get promoted to this new group. I have not seen a spammer yet on my forum whose first post wasn't blatant spam.

All you need to do is moderate one (or however many you want) post per new member. You don't even have to mess with their settings as the auto-promotion will do the work for you. This is the least labour-intensive way I've found for keeping users from seeing spam, and it works.

BTW lose the "admin to moderate new accounts" option, it is useless. As you said, unless you know the email address of every potential legitimate new user, you're just wasting your time.

[akanevsky]

The way I solved the problem on my forum is:

a) Set up a copy of Registered Users usergroup with same permissions and save settings, but add "(unmoderated)" in the title.
b) Edit the original Registered Users usergroup and set "follow forum moderation settings" to "off".
c) Create a usergroup promotion from original "registered users" to the secondary "registered users" based on, say, 5 posts.

This way, people who are in registered users usergroup have up to 5 posts will be moderated and after that they will be promoted to the unmoderated usergroup.

[AddHandler]

One thing I would like to know is why the SPAM stuff is left up to the hackers and mod creators..??

This is an expensive script and should come fully loaded with ANTI-SPAM options...
Seeing as EVERY SINGLE SPAM BOT is programmed to hit the VBulletin Scripts every 24 hours or less... VBulletin is probably the most spammed script on the net... so why doesn't it come fully loaded with ANT-SPAM measures...????

[kall]

For one, because the spammers don't just stick to the one method, they change their tactics when prevention methods are put into place.

[blind-eddie]

I have image & email verification on & I have no problems as of yet. Before I turned that on I was hit by spam in my forum. Now I get no spam at all, not even via contact us.

[Adrian Schneider]

Well the newer spam bots can bypass email and image verification... need new methods! Check my profile for a decent anti-spam hack (similar to Psionic Vision's suggestion). It has been catching 100% of spam for me on a few sites, as well as many of my friends' sites.

Another good one is the NoSpam! image verification one. You may want to also look into blocking common (spam) email providers. I would never block yahoo/msn/gmail because a HUGE chunk of people use them.