How to keep spammers away from a forum?

I'm wondering how a huge forum like DP can keep spammers away from it...

I mean, I am referring to all those spammers that sign up just to put their spam URL on their profile, for link building purposes.

If you have a forum board, phpbb or vbulletin, how can you avoid this? Is disabling the homepage url feature to only way if you don't want to manually check accounts? Moreover, how to clean your board members' profiles from existing spam urls?

any help is greatly appreciated (especially for phpbb!)

 

i think all this can be done manually only

but disabling live links is really good option used by dp

u could use that too

 

First Warn them and than Ban. yes it can be done manually. for larger forums like DP. There must be some moderators to stop this.

 

My forum has been recently hit by a bunch of spam. They get through robotic / email verification so i recon it might be done manually. They also use proxies so banning is quite a pain in the ass. I guess il have to install a few proxy detectors etc

 

how can I disable live links on phpbb?

thanks for any help!

 

Today I spent some time browsing the phpbb code to find a solution to this problem. Finally, I have solved it, making spammers work more difficult

Basically, you must change the $www and $wwwimg variables in the includes/usercp_viewprofile.php and memberlist.php to disable those nasty live links while keeping content intact. I may think to write a tutorial about it but it's maybe common stuff you can easily find with google anyway, if you need help feel free to ask!

 

Does anyone know of a plugin for phpBB that will allow me to delete multiple posts within a topic? I'm tired to manually deleting each spam post. I'm looking for something where it will let you check multiple posts and do a mass delete.

Thanks.

 

Just delete all of the spammers posts, in your admin cp.

 

In my openion if we disable the live comments less then we can cop with the situation!....or inother way delete all the spaming post ..lol!

 

I've found that a good way to stop spammers and just generally annoying people is to set the newbies member group to require moderation of their first 5 posts.

Once they make their 5th post they are automaticlly promoted into the members group which has access to more features and is non-moderated.

um... my forums uses IPB not vBulletin so not sure how the vBulletin would do this.

 

But we are very thankful for your work, because some days so much spam is coming in,that without you and the other mods the site would be in disarray, keep up the good work thanks

 

I take your point have had similar experiences in the 10 years we have been working on the Internet, but hey, this is one of the best forums around, so please keep on moderating

 

Add to your forum or any other website a poisoned apple, nice and useful spammer trap, in several languages, and with link back:

http://english-44944676604.spampoison.com

Code (markup):

 

Spammers usually send robots or automated scripts to crawl your site following all the available links.

When they find the above link, such site trigger a script providing thousand of fake emails in response, so they cannot return to your site while being fooled.

I use this protection on an Invision Forum and never had to worry for spam issues.

 

Yes, in fact there is a php script for doing such trick, available here:

http://www.mariovaldez.net/software/phpwpoison

Code (markup):

 

there're some addons to do this in the market
you can search via hotscripts