Just looking for some feedback here. Recently have been experiencing I high volume of spam signups to the point that I've had to moderate and approve all new members. Appear to be human spammers as they were getting past security questions and email conformations. Getting about 50 signups a day right now and just looking for a solution to not moderate new members. So anyone running vbulletin have success with any modifications or using the core spam system that I'm missing.
There are some really good mods but lets get a little info first. What version of vbulletin are you running, what spam mods have you added to help combat the spammers.
Use a harder security question. Not a maths question or 'common sense', something actually related to the site topic. Something a real member might be able to lookup or would know, but a bot wouldn't. Then, add some blacklist style mods. Like Stop Forum Spam or Project Honeypot or whatever. If you're on vB 4, like this: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=230921 Maybe Akismet too, if there's a mod for it. Finally, if that doesn't work, add a new verification system. Like ones where you have to piece a puzzle together, play a short game or identify which image is a picture of a kitten. Those are much harder for bots and spammers to bypass quickly.
This happened to me and @cpvr on vpl. They were getting around a permission to post blogs, I don't know exactly how but they were. We were getting around 160 sign ups a day for about 2 weeks. They were posting in the blogs system for us. We ended up moderating everything, but now we have installed a few permissions.
Ended up implementing the Stop Forum Spam Database and that stopped them from getting through. Still though had over 200 bot signups detected in the last 2 days which is crazy as I've never seen that many on any forum I've run
Try the question answer option. Make sure that you approve their accounts too. It kind of stops the spammers.
Why not block the emails that spammers are using? Go to options > censor options Here's our list Those are the two emails that spammers seem to be using to hit our site as well. Like @Iconic said after we've placed a lot of the features in mod approval, spam has seem to stopped and not as bad as it used to be.
Proper Q&A will be all you need really. Security questions that is. Make them moderately hard, even if a user has to search for the answers and make them related to your niche. If for some reason a potential new members is too lazy to search for the answer, they likely wouldn't be a good member addition on your forum anyhow. Xrumor and other bot scripts will not search for the question, they will just move on to the next victim. I have also heard good things about honeypot systems. StopForumSpam.com is good however, you risk blocking actual members who are not spammers as some people are unethical enough to submit others that don't spam for their own malicious purposes.
