An idea to stop spambots posting

jdab

jdab

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Obviously you can get Captchas to stop spambots signing up, but sometimes you still get some through. I've had an idea. On my forum that I'm setting up I have no captchas yet, so I'm getting tonnes of spam posters. I've noticed through all my forums that the bots only post in the General/Off topic discussions area, so I've come to a conclusion that there are some sort of word identifier so they know to post in that section. Maybe if we named our off topic forum something different, they wouldn't post?

Just a theory, let me know if you think it'd work.
 
Have a security question, fixed my spam problem instantly.
 
Worzox said:
Have a security question, fixed my spam problem instantly.
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What he said!

Captchas are great, but most of the forum spamming software allow users to use the API of captcha solving services.

Using a captcha, security question and stop forum spam, I get pretty much no spam.
 
It doesn't even have to be a complex security question, "enter the letter 'a' below" will work!
 
I made a little something before which blocks spam bots before they can even see the forum. It's a rough piece of code but you can alter it and make it look more pretty.

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=83407

As Fowler said it's not very practical as this is connecting to their website every time putting load on it but it's good to use until you have more of a permanent solution.
 
That code is not even good to use for a short period of time as when we notice what you are doing, your servers IP will be blocked.

This API is NOT to be used as a general software firewall. Checking every incoming connection against the API will be treated as a denial of service attack against us and will result in the immediate blocking of any offending IP numbers
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The API should only be used for checking signups etc and not for checking users who are trying to load your index page or viewing a topic.

If you want to check against the Stopforumspam.com database then you can make use of the stopforumspam.com Downloads and then check all users against a local file of IPs or install a mod/plugin if available for the software you use. A list of some mods/plugins that use the stopforumspam.com database can be found here - http://www.stopforumspam.com/contributions.

Some of these mods also make use of the "frequency" of the IP in the sfs database and when it was last seen. These reduces the amount of false positives as a dynamic IP may have been added once last year but may have been used by thousands of new innocent users since and they are still being punished.

Back to the topic in hand, renaming the forums will not stop spam. They will still sign up and spam no matter what you call the forums. The best way is to have multiple layers of protection and stop spammers from even signing up. Nothing you do will stop spammers 100%. If it was as simple as not using certain words in any forum names then all sites would follow that rule and be spam free and no sites would have CAPTCHA's and spam databases like stopforumspam.com would have no need to exist.
 
As suggested a good anti spam question for a start, then you will know if they get through you will have human spammers who are paid to trash your forums.

Next thing would be to have admin and user validation.

Thirdly you could also have the new member group have their posts moderated automatically until they hit a certain amount of posts.

Good luck and hope you see some improvements soon. 🙂
 
I use a Captcha and a security question and I have no problems at all. 🙂
 
Nuke said:
The bots got around my security question.
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Some of them will no doubt, but most of the automated software can't as of yet. Stopping spam all together is a tall order; and as fast as you find way to stop them, they're going to find new ways round it.
 
if its on wordpress, then i'd suggest using askimet. if on a forum, of course there's the captcha option and some other means of stopping spam.
 
On IcyBoards, I run all registrations through the Stop Forum Spam database: http://www.stopforumspam.com/

I also created my own simple text captcha, you can see it by clicking "I Agree" on this page: http://forums.icyboards.net/member.php?action=register all it asks is how many letters are in the word.

Using these two methods, I get like 1 "spambot" per month. I also log all IPs and how many times they've been filtered. Some IPs are in the thousands.
 
Changing the name of the forum will not achieve anything because they will still sign up and post spam in various areas.
 
Cocoa said:
Changing the name of the forum will not achieve anything because they will still sign up and post spam in various areas.
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I've neer had spam in any other forum, weird.
 
It depends on what your forum is about and what sections are open. Other people may have experienced only spam in other specific areas.
 
I have had too that bots seem to prefer certain areas and threads in my community as well. I wondered too, but I don't think making the area member only view or changing the name would really make that big of an impact. I think it is after registering they scan for similar threads to 'justify' their links, if we don't have it they would probably still post them else where.
 
Worzox said:
They go for boards with the word "Discussion"
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But the forum my spam is going into is called "General Chit-Chat"...
 
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