How do you fight the spam?

Spam is a huge problem on many sites. Different forum platforms offer various ways of combating this big problem.

What I do is use vBulletin's built-in reCaptcha Human Verification method in conjunction with the NoSpam! Q&A modification.
I also require new members' first post to be approved by a moderator, after which point they are promoted to a "full registered users" group.

So far, this has worked just fine. We still do get the occasional human spammer but they are weeded out by the moderated-first-post.

What measures do you take to prevent spam and how has it worked for you?

 

Luckily, I haven't really had any major problems with SPAM (with the exception of the situation I mentioned recently in another thread), but I have nothing but great things to say about reCaptcha. It has proven itself to be extremely effective.

 

When I first started my site I was getting 10-30 spammers signing up a day I think a lot of this came from me experimenting with paid directory services. So I got proactive and started doing an IP Trace on all new members. Then I banned everyone with Russian/Chinese IP addresses and BS emaill addresses. This reduced my spam a great deal.

But now I've upgraded to vB and use a reCaptcha Human Verification program that helps a lot. These days I'm lucky to run across 1-2 spammers a week.

 

I use the reCaptcha service in addition to a vigilant mod staff. I noticed a pickup in spam registrations over the course of a week. All started with an @moreprobe.com domain, so that was the first to be banned. After that, I made a quick tutorial for using vBulletin's "Delete as Spam" in-line moderation feature and distributed to the supermods. I'm fairly lucky since I can usually count on at least one admin/supermod being online to deal with spam issues.

 

I only see two ways to fight spam online today.

1) Registration based filtering based on the information of known spammers. This can be done by keeping manual lists in your software or tying your site into a third-part service.

I know of two services for this: BotScout.com: Proactive Bot Detection,Screening, & Banning and Stop Forum Spam - Forum Banlist.

Both have similar lists so they are probably reasonably accurate. They can be used to moderate and/or deny registration to known spammers. While not 100%, it isn't a Turing system that can be bypassed.

2) Filtering. Email based spam is fought with filtering. We have whitelists, blacklists, and bayesian keyword filters. The Bayesian filters are the most effective because they are almost always self-learning algorithms that track our habits to determine what we allow and disallow. They are the hardest to bypass on any level. At the simplest level they are based on keyword density. For example, say iPhone 5 times in a message and it can be flagged as spam. They can take into account other factors as well such as origin, IP address, email account, etc...

Akismet is a Bayesian Filter based service as are Mollom and TypePad AntiSpam.

The beauty of both of these methods is that they cannot be programmed around by spam bots. Turing (CAPTCHA) methods are fallable because they provide limited result sets and as processing power gets cheaper, they become easier to defeat.

 

I've got the recatchpa enabled, the Stop the Bots hack, Amkismet, and manually run all my registrations through the stop forum spam website. There's hack to automatically check stop forum spam? Awesome, I'll have to look into that.

Even with recatchpa, stop the bots, and Akismet I still catch a good number of spammers that get registered and are listed on stop forum spam. It's a major PITA.

 

Yes, it literally is a PITA.

 

Image Ver., Random Questions, and the good ol Spam Decimator for when things slip through.

Haven't experienced much spam yet though.

 

I make use of the reCaptcha system and email verification. I've had very little trouble with Spam using only these two methods.

On another site I admin we manually activate all users.

 

I have a tendency to keep user registration as friendly and welcoming as possible. The side effect is allowing the spam to enter that much easier. However, I find that you will not get hit with any spam at all if you stay active and luck is on your side. It's weird, a lot of the deserted sites are infested with spam - what is the point, no one will see it?

 

Hey thanks WL,

I ran a check on some questionable accounts and all were listed as spam on both of these web sites. So I pulled out the ban hammer.

Also, I got this one from the vB board...for the most part a lot of spam I get is from Russia with the emall address @mail.ru. So you can use this method to ban that email address as well as proactively ban spam IP addresses.

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> User Banning Options -> Banned Email Addresses -> mail.ru

 

They might be going for free search engine hits. That's the only reasoning I can think of off the top of my head.

Oh and I completely agree with the luck bit. I just so happened to be online at 3:00 in the morning today when a few spammers registered and starting posting their motorola ads. Luckily I was just 4 minutes behind their registration time when the banhammer slammed down. :lol:

 

Honestly, I don't have a modification that fights the spam. Though, after seeing a spam post, we put a user on moderation queue and thereafter, he/she will be closely moderated...

 

new members are put into a registered users group, the first 5 posts are moderated then they get moved into the full members group. We have been checking the email addy and location for all new sign ups, and then moving them into full members group, so most people haven't been moderated.

theres the image verification during sign up which doesn't help really but i also installed questions and answers mod which stopped all spam for about 3 weeks until today when a very suss member/spammer joined, they haven't posted yet so can't be sure.

Time to change the questions really anyway.

 

Just to add, one of our senior mods on the forum i mod on is quite obsessed with spammers. She banned ips that linked spammers etc for weeks, i thought she was mad lol, but it seemed to pay off as hardly any spammers are joining.

 

I never really have problems with spammers, really.

 

First 5 posts, Doodles? There must be a moderator/administrator on at all times, then...

Speaking for myself, I'd get pissed off that my posts won't be displayed until a moderator or an administrator logs in.

 

yeah there is pretty much.

maybe but from experience most people understand why and its better than all members getting a face full of porn

Even if it was set to 1 they would still have to wait for it to be approved, so far no one has had to wait for more than one due to how often we are on

 

Oh okay, well there's some relief!

I understand your reasoning, but 5 posts is a bit much... Two sounds more reasonable, but then again, I'm a bit too laid back and lenient.

 

yeah you are right about the amount. You can usually tell after one post but ive seen some sneaky spammers lol, who post as if a member would and the full stop at the end of a sentence is actually a link.

But Ill probably put it down to 2