Spammers attacking one specific forum topic

[CAG CheechDogg]

I agree, makes no sense to me, he allows them to register and then names the forum in a way that they would find it easily...very "creepy" eh? lol.....

[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by CAG CheechDogg

I agree, makes no sense to me, he allows them to register and then names the forum in a way that they would find it easily...very "creepy" eh? lol.....

Definitely confusing - to a rabid, militant anti-spam guy such as myself.

[xenite]

Originally Posted by chrisrouse

The category name is "General Topics". Is there something about the name that draws spam to that?

This is just since late last night.

The programs that are used to spam forums use template files that tell them what to look for. Most likely the spammers who are trying to get into your forums use templates that restrict posts to a "General [whatever]" forum category because their "self-promotional" crap would stand out in a dedicated topic forum.

Their templates may also target forum categories/names like "for sale", "marketplace", "auctions", etc.

If you hold new registrations for moderation they at least cannot post until you review them.

I consolidate as many IP addresses for filtering as possible, by stripping down IPs to common B-blocks if two or more C-blocks are used.

Most spambots these days are coming in through proxy servers, which are less likely to be used by real people wanting to talk in forums (although given recent privacy concerns that might change but people need to understand there has never been any privacy on the Internet).

So, if you get two spam accounts from IP addresses that look like this:

A.B.1.0
A.B.25.0

I check to see what country A.B.0.0 has been assigned to using a service like IPDB.AT and if it's China or some other Asian country where I'm not likely to attract any real users, I just block all registrations from A.B in the VBulletin block list.

This practice has helped to cut down on robot registrations considerably.

I don't use CAPTCHAs in my forums because there are spam services that feed your CAPTCHA image to a queue, which is reviewed by human users in Asia (or the Philippines -- there is more than one such service). The human users solve the CAPTCHAs in the queues and the robots feed the answers back to the forums.

There is no perfect system to stop forum spam but at the very least you don't have to allow the spammers to get in.

On the other hand, if your honeypot really works (and only the dumbest of spammers would look for "honeypot" forums) then at least your normal users would know not to look in there. You can block that forum in your "robots.txt" so that Bing and Google don't see all the spam links and downgrade your forums for being spam-friendly (and that really happens -- I've worked with several forums that had to clean up the mess and file reconsideration requests).