Im having serious issues with di*cheads spamming my forum....Im curious how you guys prevent this from happening I already installed a pretty nice filter but they seem to get past that as well....they keep posting porn or pill sites....very frustrating
If there is one way to do it, its to hire better moderators with quicker response time. Even this won't eliminate the problem. Any repeat offenders should be IP banned in my opinion.
I'd start by looking for filters that are proven to help against spammers. There have to be some out there.
It is a very big problem on the net. The spam that you have on your forum is most likely being done by an automated spam bot. These bots search forums around the net and register fake users to spam the forum with links, to promote to promote their sites (a nasty SEO method). In forums these types of things can be avoided using Captcha and email verification and so on. Here is a link i dug from the web that may assist you: Protection from spammer bots Best of luck.
thanks guys, since its a new forum its mainly just me moderating it but I check it a few times a day...
I would think some tips to help with that would be to ban offenders by their IP. Also make sure every new user has to verify their email address before they sign up(I think many spammes don't put down their real email addresses). Also if your forum software has the catchpa feature then enable it. That way new users have to type letters in a box to verify they are an actual person and not a bot. Hope this helps.
I was just thinking, does anyone know of a list of blocked spammer IP addresses? Because if whenever someone or a bot started to spam a forum, their IP was posted on an online database, then everyone could block them, and thus prevent them from spamming their forum... Kind of George Orwell- Big brother ish, but it would be kinda cool. Diarmuid
Well, if you're looking for moderators, I could probably do something..We could work some type of thing out. That is, if you feel that it is necessary. I am not sure if it is or not.
thanks Celtik maybe in the future atm we dont even really have posters yet which is frustrating, but its hard to get people posting about credit related stuff. we may eventually run a contest to get people posting but that will be a little down the road.
try a new forum like PHPbb3 or the newest vbulletin. These handle spam pretty well. Blocking IPs wont do shit, its incredibly easy for spammers to rotate through a list of proxies longer than you can imagine.
I have an addon that makes people post at least once before they can post links. This prevents 80% of my spam problem which were mostly bots.
I have found email verification cut all of the spammers from my system. Captcha slowed it down but now they get a random password through email and that has stopped them. They can register but can't log in until they get their password. This is standard on YABB.
I don't really know much about stopping spammers because my forum is exclusive for a group of about 45 and membership is by invitation only. I approve each member before their account becomes active. This is definitely not feasible for an open kind of forum that is trying to attract a lot of members. Before I set it up I did quite a bit of research and decided to use SMF because it seemed to have the best reviews in terms of avoiding spammers. From all my research phpBB seemed to be the worst hit by spam bots. But I think requiring email verification would be one good deterrent, as well as setting up something where a poster can only post links after having say 10 posts. Lastly, as you grow, you may want to have a bunch of moderators. I am in the planning stages of a public forum and community site, so it will be a real test of SMF then, and I am sure I will need to deal with the spamming problem then! my 2c
In my experience, Captcha and email verification have done very little to reduce the spam problem in my forums and elsewhere. The bots figure them out. The only thing that has done a good job is disallowing new members from posting links. I don't let people post links in my forum until they have 3 posts.