FECKIN SPAMMERS!

[Circuitbenders]

This is probably a long shot but does anyone know of any reliable method of stopping spammers signing up to this forum? At the moment i'm having to delete about 20-30 accounts every day with email addresses such as XXXX@viagra.com or similar. I'm assuming that most of these sign ups are automatic as they never get verified because the email address doesn't actually exist, so whats the point of them?

I've already banned every registration from a .ru email and a few other suspect ones but other than needing every registration to be approved by hand i don't see what can be done about it?

any ideas?

[gmeredith]

I think the only way is to do member verification approval, most of the Yahoo forums I'm in have had to do it that way. I've seen one forum completely destroyed by spam.

Cheers, Graham

[Circuitbenders]

Its getting a bit daft now.

137 attempted registrations from banned known spammer emails. IP's and domains in the last 2 days! 

[Luka]

we just keep banning common extensions of their email address

and also make sure that users cant post urls until they reach a certain amount of posts

[Signal:Noise]

We've got a big problem with spammers over at FSOR, had to delete around 20 post of utter shit just today.

[Circuitbenders]

Only ever had 3 actual posts from spammers on this board, endless sign ups though. I don't understand the point of it

[Signal:Noise]

Can we find out where the people programming the spam bots live and then force feed them spam until their lower intestines expolde?

[Circuitbenders]

to be honest i find it quite insulting that these cretins seem to think they are going to get away with attempting to register with an email address like pharmacist@viagra.com or hotbustybabes@freesex.com.

Not that i have anything against hot busty babes but you'd think they could at least attempt to be sneaky about it and use a slightly less obvious email address

[kick52]

It's a mystery to me how the fuck these people think spam works.
I get IRC spam. It's fucking pointless.

[SineHacker]

It's a mystery to me how the fuck these people think spam works.
I get IRC spam. It's fucking pointless.

there must be some poor people out there who are dumb enough to buy into it. otherwise they wouldn't bother. Imagine being that dumb

[NerveJam]

Hi.
I have a similar problem on both nervejam.com, and the crumar yahoo group.

The forum at NerveJam.Com uses phpbb3, which allows the use of captcha (the numbers and letters verification thing). Before that, I used to approve or reject members manually: about 100 a day..
Even now, some determined spammers get through, but since there are at least 5 moderators, their messages don't last long. I have also used the "word censor" system to automatically replace some phrases: eg: "Britney Spears" becomes "John Prescott". Think: John Prescott naked.... shudder.. You don't want to know what Viagra gets replaced by! There's a warning that all posters are open to ridicule and abuse by moderators and the system itself..

PHPBB also allows you to ban mail domains, and words within email addresses. I banned Rumania..

On the crumar group, I allow anyone to join, but approve all posts manually. That's fine, as there are a small number of posts. That group used to get 100+ spam messages a day, until I took it over (the "owner" had disappeared).
Only had three such attempts in the last 6 months.

Anyway, I'm not sure what this forum runs on, but it'll have something similar to phpbb3.

[Circuitbenders]

This forum runs on SMF and there is now a decent captcha for new signups which has helped a lot but we still have a lot of problems with gmail accounts. So much so that i've had to ban gmail registrations as their security is just completely fucked.

I tend to ban individual IP addresses when theres several registrations from the same IP which are obviously spam. Theres also bans on .ru and a load of similar hostname extensions.

The most common thing at the moment is for spammers to sign up and not actually post any spam, but instead they enter a website homepage in their profile which links to some spam site. Why they think for a second that anyone is going to be looking at their profile and click on that link other than other spambots is anyones guess. It all seems monumentally pointless to me.

[Gordonjcp]

What about Akismet?  That seems a pretty effective spamcatcher.

[Tyler1144]

if($ip == %(IPwildcard)
{
die ("go away DICK");
}

[Circuitbenders]

Should be getting a lot less spam signups from now on. I've just installed a plugin that compares the email and IP of every attempted registration with the massive database of spammers at http://www.stopforumspam.com/ and if it matches its flagged for admin approval before they can post anything.

If anyone else is running a forum i can recommend it as a really good antispam tool.