What's the best way I can minimize spammers registering on my forum? Lately I've been getting an increasing amount of automatic registrations, when I check the IP or email address they're identified as spam.
Have you tried using a text question like "What is the closest planet to the sun?" That one has worked better for me than any version of CAPTCHA, and a text question like the one I gave is better than a simple math question, or a question wherein one of the words is the answer.
With vBulletin, my solution has been to install the StopForumSpam modification. It has worked wonders, and decreased spam by 99%. (StopForumSpam works)
The only issue I have with stopforumspam, is that while it stops a lot, it does not stop it all. I use it in conjunction with a lot of the other mods and methods mentioned in the article I linked above.
Do you have any idea what this thread is about? Please tell how what you linked to has anything to do with stopping forum spam? How is blocking the harvesting of email addresses have anything to do with blocking spam on forums?
Actually it doesn't. It stops most of them. It needs to be used in conjunction with other mods and other strategies.
1 - use the recaptcha, its built in, all you have to do is get a key from the recaptcha website. 2 - install the "Stop Forum Spam" modification at vbulletin.org With those 2, your spam problems are going to disappear.
I suggest using CAPTCHA mentioned above but also create your own question for users when they register. Note: Don't put the answer in your question. Example of a wrong question: What color is the yellow sun? Answer: Yellow Example of a correct question: What color is the sun? Answer: Yellow This is one of the easiest things to do to prevent spam bots from registering on your forum. I have had a 99% success rate doing this. I also change my question and answer every couple of weeks. Good luck.
It does. It probably has to do with the question framed. The question should be answerable by a human, but not by a bot. I have only one question in my forum and no capcha. It has stopped bots. Yes, all bots. Humans registering to spam the board is a different problem. Further reference for framing NoSpam questions: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=10908890&postcount=12
Actually that's a bad question as well. The sun's color is white. It just appears yellow to us here on Earth. I'm very much against Captchas for this reason as well as many folks have problems with them. I know with one of our offsite DNS VPSes, they use some sort of ticket system with a captcha and I can not read it as it's too small. Folks coming off of broken proxy systems (ie Comcast, schools, etc.) or certain communities (ie Singapore) have a great deal of problems with them as they force cached pictures, even with cache breaking in place. I know in the library system I use, they have ReCaptcha blocked even because it's used on sex/ porn sites. Gotta love my library. ReCaptcha is known to be readable anyway. We use an inhouse system for our clients based on Spam Assassin. Works fine and we can cross apply it between servers. Please consider this site as it has a great deal of information as well as an API you can use to check new signups: http://www.stopforumspam.com/ Hope this helps, -drmike