Reduce the SPAM on your forum: vBulletin tips!

Reduce spam on your forum
I have a big spam problem, and usually I would ban the spammers and delete their posts - but sometimes they just come back again and again. It really pissed me off.

Really - we were mostly dealing with BOTs -- automated scripts that would register on our forums and spam post every each day. After a lot of trial and error, I have come up with the way to minimize the spam on my forums. And if you have the same problems and still wondering how to rid off here's my suggestion to you, guys.

Just follow these simply steps below, and you should be able to dramatically reduce the spam on your forum also.


STEP ONE
Ban some email addresses.

These are some of the most common spammers. By far not all of them, but its some of the main ones used by spammers. To ban these email addresses, go to your ADMIN CP> vBULLETIN OPTIONS> USER BANNING OPTIONS> Banned Email Addresses

Note that partial email addresses are matched from the end of the address unless you enable "Aggressive Email Banning" below. Therefore if you ban @example.com you will ban , but if you ban @example that user will not be banned. If you enable "Aggressive Email Banning", would be banned by @example.​

If the email address of a user attempting to register or change their email address matches any of the addresses you specify here will see a no-permission error. For example, if you have banned 'example.com' then a user attempting to use 'someone@example.com' will be rejected.​

STEP TWO

Install the hack NoSpam! - an alternative to CAPTCHA images

This simple hack is meant as a replacement for the default CAPTCHA system in vBulletin. What does this hack do ? As part of the registration process, It asks a question. Any question you want. That's the best part: YOU make up the questions, which means that every forum is unique, which means that it is impossible for spambots to be simply programmed to bypass it at all forums with the hack installed.

STEP THREE

For the occasional spam posters that get through the above hack, install this second Hack to Prevent Spam. This hack is misnamed a bit. It doesnt actually prevent spam, it prevents your members from seeing it. This hack automatically scans new posts from new members for common spam keywords. If any are found, the post/thread will be sent to the moderation queue to prevent their spam from having any affect.

I also recommend you install the hack

QUICKMODERATION: Moderation queue info on Forums The reason for this is that with the Hack to Prevent Spam I mentioned above some moderated posts may be missed by your moderators because a moderated post isn't very obvious. This hack places a small bar just below the navbar that only your staff can see which alerts your staff that a thread or post needs to be moderated. This way they don't get missed. This is important because you don't want new members' posts to get lost in the moderation queue.

These three easy steps can almost eliminate spam from your forum, and make even less spam viewable to your members. I cannot stress enough that you do all three steps.

Cheers

 

This is the only anti-bot mod I've needed: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=135094

This mod calculates the time it takes to go between these two pages:

/forum/register.php?do=register
/forum/register.php?do=addmember

The point is to try and prevent bots from registering at your forum when the time between the two pages is humanly impossible, assuming that humans actually take the time to complete the registration page.

Should a user be blocked from registering at your forum, an email will be sent to your vB webmasteremail address and the user will see the vB noregister phrase message, so no screenshot is necessary.

 

I recently did an article at my forum regarding this, specifically for vBulletin. This was mainly because of the recent surge in spam attacks. I used a variety of sources to get the information and you can see the links to learn more. There are several things that can be done, one of the msot effective, for me, was the introduction of Akismet.

http://www.adminfuel.com/articles/1075-vbulletin-reducing-spam.html