Bots

[Merlin]

Does anyone know a way to stop bots from registering on a free forum host? Do things like spam poison work? I've tried banning the ending of a wave of bots registering with .cn addresses, but they can still register. :evil:

 

[CyberFreak]

With a free host it is up to the host to install mods to stop them... If they don't then you can't do much. Just do wildcard email banning and don't do IP banning as it is kinda pointless as they use so many.

For common spammers emails and domains they use look at these as the list the commonly used ones that you can block and it should stop alot.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost ... ostcount=1
http://forums.invisionize.com/lofiversi ... 17667.html

And here is a very very big list but you need to register first - http://forumnutsandbolts.freeforums.org ... 8-t34.html

That should stop most but not all as some use hotmail, gmail and yahoo but 99% don't. It should help abit. Make sure you have email validation set to yes aswell!

 

[Merlin]

Tons have been registering using .cn (Chinese) e-mail addresses, but I put *cn*, *.cn, *@*.cn, and more, but they still get in!

 

[CyberFreak]

They still get in using cn emails? They shouldn't do -~-

 

[Merlin]

It doesn't even get added onto the e-mail banlist...

 

[Zyenet]

I just let the bots sit, because they never post on my forum, just register.
Two other extensions you should ban are .ws and .ru (Russian), I get a lot of them with that extension, as well as .cn.

 

[CyberFreak]

It doesn't even get added onto the e-mail banlist...

Sounds like a problem with the banning system.

Have you asked on the support forum why it happens?

 

[Carson]

Yeah, you may want to contact your host about it.

Oh, and until your ban system gets fixed, you may want to try the spam poison thing. 🙂

 

[Merlin]

Tried spam poison, didn't help.

 

[Carson]

Well, your host should be able to figure out where the bots are coming from and possibly block them.

 

[CyberFreak]

The host should really just add a new anti spam mod rather then going through the hassle of banning ips as they use millions if different IPs and by banning ips on that scale you risk banning real users.

 

[Merlin]

Yeah. We have two anti-spam MODS.

1. The "Can't-Post-Links-Until-You-Have-A-Certain-Number-Of-Posts" MOD. It works great! No bot has been able to bypass it!

2. A one that makes it so you can't register if you fill in the profile information. It sucks. It doesn't stop bots, all it does is annoy regular humans.