Thanks for logging into the ACP to find that, I was simply too lazy... I have that, and am still getting the WOW spammers. They are human... What really needs to happen is we should all log into such sites and spam them back... like sending them thousands of emails telling them thanks for the links, and flood their forums with links back to our own sites, etc... I'm not talking about the spammers, but rather the sites they are spamming. Reporting them to their servers can also help in some cases, as well as shooting out an email to the ISP's of the spammers. Yeah, it takes a lot of time to keep up, but if we all take a little time and report one or two a week, then that will make a difference.
i have had an uptick in the last 3 days of heavy spamming of my forum as well..i have the email verification on now,so maybe it will stop(or slow down)
Well well...seems having VB can bring you spam troubles. It's not always best being #1 now is it? Mybb isn't targetted by auto-spam bots so it's never been a problem for me. As for deleting manual spammers: http://www.mybbcentral.com/thread-1727.html
It is not just vb that is being affected: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=286535 The new wave of spam seems to get around the default image verification methods used on the popular forum scripts. Email verification and using the mod nospam for 3.7 helped stop the spam on my forum.
I made it so they had to answer a question before joining such as What is 2+2?. This has stopped the Bots from joining dramatically.
I've got all of the above enabled and found this this weekend and it's stopping them at registration, provides you a log and ability to report, it's caught over 500 on just one of my forums in 3 days some will get through but it's not nearly as bad now. http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=176481
Check these two posts at the vbulletin forum: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1632025&postcount=97 http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1632925&postcount=143 I tried 2+2 and 2+3....the bots know answers to these questions. Use a more difficult question.
If you use a Q&A I like to avoid math as it's fairly easy for any language person to do math. However if they don't speak english they can't answer this: "Type the first word of this sentence into the following box". or "Type the last word..." etc etc Math questions are going to end up being spammed soon as they figure out how to bot them.