Is anyone (especially with vBulletin) getting hit harder than ever with those W.O.W spam bots? I can't seem to stop them fast enough. What's the best way to protect against this? I don't want to put new members' posts in a queue, it's too much to handle.
Read through this thread - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1003722 You can enable aggressive email banning to prevent spam bots from signing up. Just ban email domains like msn, gmail, yahoo or anything thing else they are using. When you have a spammer sign up, add their email domain to your list. This way no more email addresses will be accepted from that domain. I posted the list I am using in the thread I linked to. Do a google search for free email services, and add the domain names you find to the list. Most of the spammers I got were using gmail or hotmail. After I banned those domains, my spam dropped quit a bit. The point is to make new members enter their real email address provided by their ISP.
thanks - the issue with blocking things like Gmail is that a lot of my users use that service (same for Yahoo). I just don't get how these bots are getting through captcha. Would they get through the math verification one (the "what is 5+2" one)?
Increase the complexity of your captcha and that will stop the bots. If you have capthca enabled and you have email verification enabled, chances are these are real people signing up on your forum. Security measures I have taken: 1 - captcha - and I use a weak capthca 2 - ban free email accounts The problem I had, email verifications to hotmail and gmail were not going through. I can only guess that the message was blocked by a spam filter. A lot of my members contacted me saying their activation emails were never received. So I finally had to disable email activation. Because hotmail and gmail blocked my members activation emails, I do not accept email addresses from those domains. There is a modification on vbulletin.org, its called "Read books stop spam" or something like that. Its where the person has to type a word to complete their registration. You can enter several words that are displayed at random.
Best method to stop VB forum spam...stop using VB. Use alternative forum software like mybb. I have yet to be spam botted on it. I have sites with significant activity and growth as well.
Add another field to be filled in while registering. Admin CP > User Profile fields > Add new User profile field I have added "Location" (Single-Line Text Box) and "Gender" (Single-Selection Radio Buttons). Set "Field Required" for both as "Yes, at registration and profile updating". Both have been set with "no default" Thus-far no non-human bots have crossed this check. Mine is only a few months old V-bulletin forum.