stopping forum spammers?

[xentech]

Originally Posted by kingcobra

Just FYI, a lot of spammers get around the captcha easily by just typing it in but the email confirmation stops them which is why so many forums require both now.

Actually I've done a lot of forum spamming myself, and most people use software which cracks captcha's and activates by e-mails on it's own.

[kingcobra]

Originally Posted by xentech

Actually I've done a lot of forum spamming myself, and most people use software which cracks captcha's and activates by e-mails on it's own.

LOL well it's nice to have the spammers chirp in on this and you're right even the activation emails won't stop everyone but I've had some good luck with it. If the person does want to provide working email addresses then you're going to have to work a little harder, for instance approve the people manually, but a lot of spammers don't want to be bothered going through the process of email verification and will move on to easier targets.

[xentech]

Originally Posted by kingcobra

LOL well it's nice to have the spammers chirp in on this and you're right even the activation emails won't stop everyone but I've had some good luck with it. If the person does want to provide working email addresses then you're going to have to work a little harder, for instance approve the people manually, but a lot of spammers don't want to be bothered going through the process of email verification and will move on to easier targets.

Yeh you're right, email activation will keep off most manual spammers

If you use vBulletin there are loads of plugins on vBulletin.org for spam prevention, read the comments on them to find an effective one.

[suffolkpoker]

LOL yea it is actually, i don't want Manuel activations, that sounds like a mega pain in the bum aswell.

Its actually making me think is it worth it?

trying to remember who said it would be a good add on!

Originally Posted by kingcobra

LOL well it's nice to have the spammers chirp in on this and you're right even the activation emails won't stop everyone but I've had some good luck with it. If the person does want to provide working email addresses then you're going to have to work a little harder, for instance approve the people manually, but a lot of spammers don't want to be bothered going through the process of email verification and will move on to easier targets.

[kingcobra]

The problem with manual activations isn't even all the time you spend on this, it's not really knowing who is who before you approve them, and often they will pose as a legitimate signup and later they start talking pharma or whatever their favorite topic is, then you clean and ban, but that makes the manual part a waste of time if you're doing a lot of this.

[leporello]

My vbulletin site is getting inundated with spam. I had to close the entire thing off last week as some blackhatters had posted viagra, pharmacy and porn ads all over it. I'm going to sort out recaptcha and email validation. Hopefully thatll address the problems...

[RobinGbg]

I have this forum:
Nodeposit.se - Forum - Index

Its a SMF forum and i have alot of new bots each day.
I need good protection from them, any advice?

[kingcobra]

Email validation can help, so can captcha, so can banning their IP, if that all doesn't work then you can require manual authorization and you can look at their signup profiles and pretty much weed them out at that level.

[Poker Dude]

Email activation is essential. Most of these spammers have bots running that look for forums such as yours, and automatically sign up and post. If you can force a manual email acceptance step, that will get rid of a good # of them. Banning IP's is a waste of time, since most of these IP's are dynamic in nature, and the professional spammers have a slew of IP's that they use.

[kingcobra]

I've found the same thing poker dude, as far as banning the IP's that's probably true but with some programs you delete their posts and ban their IP in one step so it can't hurt I guess.