Anyone seen an uprising in manually signed up people (beating CAPTCHA) posting spam on there messageboards.. i've had about 20 a day over the past few days
I'm pretty sure that most bots can get past CAPTCHA. It's like a constant battle between forum developers & spammers.
I am having GREAT trouble with some spammers who post (porn) links all over my forum I hate it. And its a headache now. I closed the forum./
Are you running phpBB? I own a forum that used to run phpBB and was attacked with the porn spam and yeah, we ended up having to get rid of the forum completely as there was no efficient way to mass delete the spam.
It certainly did chase away all members. I was using "IPB 2.0" for a long time. Never upgraded. Anyways, now as I lost the installation. I have re-started it wil SMF.
Actually with the right mods I found phpBB was much easier to defend against than vBulletin is. Blasphemy, I know, but vBulletin is extremely over rated/over priced.
Fight the spammers! I used to get lots and lots of spam all the time especially in my low pr threads! Step one turn email verification on. Step two block ips of spammers if you would like a list of the ips I have blocked let me know. Step three block common email extensions of the spammers. Step four if you want to you can install an mod to make it so users can not post links until they make a certain number of posts. (i dont do this anymore because it was really not needed maybe if my forums get larget i will reactivate it). I dont get much spam anymore about once a week someone will actully break through the system and if they do it is erased very quickly the ip is traced and banned depending on where it orginated. Depending on the email extension they used I will ban that too... Then again I only want to deal with traffic from the usa so I have no problem going and banning email extensions that end in .ru or .ua and thats where alot of the spam comes from anyways. Hope this helps you all out. Dont loose the fight against the spammers.
Step one would be to diddle the options in captcha to make it harder to read. Random font's, slant & colors can all help. Many bots can read straight text, even on an image.
It's not easy to beat manual spammers. But I think we sorted out a good way to do it on a vB forum. There are a couple hacks on vbulletin.org that prevent members from posting URLs or Email addresses until they hit a certain post count. We set the post count to 5. This seems to stall all of the automated bots and frustrate the manual spammers as well. Since I implemented this, we went from 5 or 6 spammers a week down to 1 every 2 months. There are some plugins that also change CAPTCHA to a question, with the ability to add multiple questions. "What is 10 plus 2" or "What is 3 times 3" for example. You can also write words backwards and ask the member to re-write them correctly as the answer. This impedes automated bots almost completely. I do not know anything about SMF or phpBB. But vB is not that hard to secure, the product/plugin system is a dream and the community is enormous.
I remember a day when the internet was friendly place and spam was no so common. Where have the good old days gone. A forum I was ran was getting all kinds of spam, ranging from weight loss ads to free medical drugs.
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=133826 If you read through to the end of the thread (recommended) he posted an xml product that does the emails as well. hth
Probably because they restrict the posting of URLS. It's really as simple as telling the bot it cannot do what it is programmed to do. And because the bot designer has no idea how many posts the robot must make to get permissions, they are better off to go after unsecured boards.
It got so bad on my forum that I started reviewing all accounts prior to accepting. That has eliminated all spam. There is still around 5 spammers that apply each day though.