So much SPAM!

[skubaman]

Hi,
Running Vb 3.8.8. I have human verification on with recaptcha. I also run vBStopForumSpam and Spam Manager linked to Akismet. Nonetheless there has been an explosion of spam on my forum recently. There are so many new members and messages that it's hard to clean up.

How are bots signing up as new users when I have recaptcha on? What can I do to reduce spam at this point?

If you also have any tips on how I can quickly delete the current spam would be really helpful. Currently I have to go topic to topic, selecting all posts and deleting as spam. Is there a quicker way to identify all spam?

Thank you so much

[Bozza]

Do you manually verify accounts? That's what we have done for a long, long time - it's the best way to stop anything coming through.

That said we don't get many spammers getting in (on our vB4 site) and do not run any of the measures you detail above. We have human verification with custom questions on the subject matter of our forum niche.

We did have a recent explosion however, and they were getting in through Tapatalk where the parameters were initially set to allow people to bypass the manual new account verification. Once we turned that off, they went away immediately again.

[skubaman]

Hi, I did not require approval for new users. That usually causes a big drop in participation. But since I noticed this big increase in SPAM, I have switch to require approval until I can improve the situation.

Vbulletin support said I should switch from recaptcha to questions and answers. I do feel these can create drop off of registrations as well, but I will give it a try.

Right now, I am getting about 1 new SPAM member per hour.

Anybody has tips to clean up the spam quick? I don't like that limit that we can't delete more than 50 spam messages from same author through the forum, only through admin.

Thanks

--------------- Added [DATE]1437524720[/DATE] at [TIME]1437524720[/TIME] ---------------

Was wondering if anyone can recommend a good solution to clean up spam that will work on vB 3.8.8?

Is there a way to block any account trying to sign up with a .ru email address? Is there a way to ban users in bulk and delete all their messages? Let's say find everyone with email .ru, ban them and delete all their posts?

Thanks

[skubaman]

Hi, still hoping someone can suggest some tools/mods. I know of mods to help block spam posts. But I am in need of doing a big cleanup. There are so many SPAM posts that I can manually delete the posts and ban users one by one.

I already have "one touch ban" mod but it requires doing one user at a time. I have hundreds to ban.

I am familiar with the tools provided by vB, but looking for more efficient solutions. For example:

- way to search all users with email ending in .ru and ban them all in bulk? Even better if it will delete all their messages at the same time
- or search all posts with the word "sunglasses", and then I can delete all in bulk, and even better ban all the users that posted them.

Thanks so much

[kh99]

This is a kind of risky thing that involves changing the database directly, but I think what you can do is this:

1) Create a new usergroup (probably by copying the banned group), and note the usergroupid.

2) Do one or more queries to update users' usergroupids to the one you just created, based on whatever criteria you want. Obviously this requires some sql knowledge. But for example, you mentioned email addresses ending in .ru . This should do that:

UPDATE user SET usergroupid=X WHERE email LIKE '%.ru'

where X is the usergroup id of the new usergroup you created in step 1. Obviously this is the dangerous part. If you make a mistake in the query you could change all users or something bad like that. If you want to try this, make a database backup first.

If you wanted to look over the users before setting a new usergroup, you could do this:

SELECT username, email FROM user WHERE email LIKE '%.ru'

(Note that the WHERE part is the same as in the UPDATE query).

3) Now you can use Move/Prune users to delete all users in the new group, and all their posts and anything else should be gone as well.

Danger Will Robinson! Use at your own risk. Backup first!