I have used many SPAM blocking plugins including custom questions at sign up! Still, I have spam users registering and posting advertisements etc. Does anyone have any powerful plugin to stop this madness!! :frown: Thanks!
I've been using Moderate New Registrations Based On IP Geographical Origin - vBulletin.org Forum with good success. Being the majority of my members are US based with a smattering from the EU I can pretty much force all registration attempts from know spammer locations to placed in a moderation queue.
Vbulletin has built in features to stop spam, there is no reason to have a plugin, If you just have to have one, look up "Is bot" on vbulletin.org. Enable ReCaptcha and be done with it. But if you are using random question already, chances are that is a person and not a bot.
You can hire any data entry service in India or Pakistan to post your message on 1000 sites for about $30.00 (US). Personally, I use IsBot and Botscout. BotScout should really be called SpammerScout because it doesn't check whether its an actual bot. I also have Typepad Anti-spam turned on within vBulletin, just in case a spammer gets through. For human verification, I use Recaptcha with the Clean interface on my own public and private keys.
I use IsBot. When I first installed it, I kept the lines of code that would send me an email every time a bot would try to sign up. I was getting 90 emails a day. I had to turn that off. We still get bots - about 2 or 3 a week - but I use One-Touch Ban & Spam Cleanup and the mods can just delete all the posts and ban the user with the click of a button.
Is that mod (one touch ban and cleanup) any different than the built-in "Delete as Spam"? I presume it does much more than that, but I'm not sure what...
The results can be the same - the posts are soft deleted and the user banned - however, the mod allows you to do it with one-click to a page, then a click to finish unlike all the clicks and options you have to select when you do it with Delete as Spam.
I use ReCaptcha or NoSpam! with vbStopForumSpam - known spammer lookup for new registrations - vBulletin.org Forum and One Touch Ban & Spam Cleanup for anything that gets by.
Thanks for your replies guys! I have used most of them. Now I will try isBot and BotScout and post the results. What surprises me is that the spammer gets past the random question + recaptcha! even the vbulletins own antispam feature.
Humans can do that. You'd be surprised at the amount of forum spam that is actually done by people and not bots. At least half from my experience.
Like really, don't they have anything better to do!!! isBot seems to work so far...the moment I installed, It blocked 3!
Most of them are paid to get past registration forms, and they sometimes pass the spamming onto the bots. I guess once they successfully register, they enter the username/password into the spamming database or something.
I'm amazed someone hasn't pointed this out already. If you can ban free email. If you can't ban ( mail.ru ) which will eliminate most of your Russian spam.
thanks to you guys, I haven't had a single bot get past the isBot timing. So far blocked around 10 ... and I noticed the paid to spam posters too, I have banned them. *sigh* ... crazy world!
You're not going to defeat Indians or Xrumer in most cases; limit what brand new users can do. Have an automatic PM explain this to them.
