Forum spammers

I get a lot of spammers signing up just to leave a link within their profile and also a ICQ UIN number. Sometimes there will be a Skype name also, but mostly just the ICQ number. Another interesting characteristic is that the profile field, Biography is often filled in with "Man". I have seen it at least a dozen times. I've just been deleting these users, but I'm curious why the ICQ number and obvious giveaway of using "man" in the profile field?

 

Yeah, I also noticed some "eccentricities" about these spam bots. I don't notice them anymore because they all seem to be stumped by a simple registration question: what is the closest planet to the Sun?

 

I'll take that as good advise to get a sign up mod to trip them up. It gets to be a pain after awhile deleting and banning email addresses. I had one sign up just now, between these posts. lol.

 

Have you added hacks such as IsBot to help stem the tide?

Depending on your audience location the Country Mod is also quite useful. My site is very US based and the product in our niche is not sold worldwide. This allows me to block entire countries with known spammers from getting a foothold. There are no MINIs in Nigeria for example.

 

I don't have any mods at this time. I have used the country mod in the past and really like it, and was thinking of using it again, but first I might try other means as this forum is intended for a global audience. I'll check out IsBot. Thanks.

 

well, i practically solved the spammer problem by a very simple measure: made some profile fields required, placed '-' as the first available option in every such field and wrote a little plugin that checks these fields and gives out registration error if they're empty or equal to '-'. spam bots are stupid and are filtered out completely, bots backed by live people of course can bypass this but they're very rare on my forum, there were only several of 'em in half an year. for these, manual deletion works fine. so i can tell this helps.

 

thats a good idea not heard of that method before

 

BananaQueen,

well, i tried to force new users to fill in actual field values and not just the first available ones, but accidentally got spambot protection as well.

 

That was a clever trick, nohunu.

StopForumSpam has weeded out 99% of the spam I used to get: http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/community-forum-software/stopforumspam-works-4416/

 

We've got various domains on blacklist or disallowed.

Other part is a required profile field that has a certain format that is unique to every owner. We only have people that play Steam games, thus they have a Steam ID number. Sure limits casual people coming to sign up, of course, but that is the point.

 

What about people who are interested in Steam, want to learn about it, but don't have a Steam ID? Are they not allowed?

 

Since my forum is music instrument related, I ask a general knowledge question that most anyone would know, however, I ask it by naming an actual instrument (e.g. How many strings are on a Frizblat X? as opposed to how many strings are on a guitar). I don't use a drop down box for the answer - either they have to type the number of the word representation of the number.

It's worked very well, combined with admin-only activation. We've modified our email template to ask the user for their real name and location, and how they found our site. If we get a response, they get activated.

No spammers have gotten through both layers yet.

 

I'll bite.

How many strings are on a Frizblat X?

I'm a music illiterate! LOL...

 

Actually, I ask about a Gibson Les Paul, a Fender Stratocaster or some other six string guitar I just rotate the question around to keep people on their toes...

 

This was a HUGE problem before me before I upgraded to the latest version of vB (3.8.4). I really couldn't find a way to avoid it even after installing a few suggested hacks that came off of vBulletin.org. The only fixed that seemed to work was activating the captcha image at registration.