Guests posting and sending PMs

[restawhile]

Hi All - hope you can help with this.
Running vBulletin 3.8.4 Patch Level 2 and will soon be moving to V4
We have been having problems for some time with the occasional spam post by Guests and we now seem to be getting PMs to some of our members by Guests.
As far as we can tell all board settings are correct to prevent Guest posts - Is there something obvious we are missing here?
Any help much appreciated.
Tom

[kevcj]

Are you deleting accounts? That will make the sent message look like it came from "guest".

[restawhile]

kevcj
Many thanks for your reply.
Yes, we are deleting Spam poster's accounts.
Can you be a bit more specific about the consequence of this regarding Guests posts and PMs. Not sure what you mean by: "That will make the sent message look like it came from "guest"." in this context?
Tom

[Iguana Goddess]

You are deleting the accounts so the PMs will show as guest instead of the name they had used. They might be messages that were sent before you deleted the accounts.

[restawhile]

Got it!
Many thanks to all.

[dekaybrown]

Human verification is an awesome tool to prevent this....

[Tourmeister]

I have recently been getting spammers that are somehow able to send PM's to other users BEFORE the accounts of the spammers are active and while they are still in the "Users awaiting email confirmation" usergroup. I have double checked to make sure that PM's are disabled for that usergroup. The spam users do not belong to any other secondary usergroups. Moreover, they are able to send to many users at one time even though I have that disabled as well.

The message usually says something like "Hello friend..." then includes a link to a site that tries to load a virus on your machine. I can't figure out how they are able to send these PM's. Once we are aware of the spammer, we delete all PM's sent by the user and then nuke the account. At NO TIME was their account ever active though.

I use the image verification. It is worthless. The spammers go right past it with no problems at all. I also have multiple questions they are required to answer, but that does not come into play until AFTER they have clicked the link in the confirmation email and their accounts are waiting for final moderation. They are spamming me before they get to that step.

--------------- Added [DATE]1263507927[/DATE] at [TIME]1263507927[/TIME] ---------------

Figured it out.

I forgot that after the users click the confirmation link in the email, they change usergroup again to "(Coppa) Users awaiting confirmation". It was while they were in this step, but before we scanned the list of new accounts, that they were able to send out PM's. I did not realize that this one usergroup did not have the PM's disabled... DOH! It is now disabled and hopefully that will stop this particular form of spam.

These spammers are relentless. I regularly delete 5-7 spam accounts every single day.

[Trichomes]

its a real pain in the ass these spammers, I activate manually now, after they fill out a question as to why they want to join, but while they are waiting for activation they are sending these pm's nightmare, hopefully found the setting to stop this now.

Good luck fellow forumers

http://www.itstooloud.com

T