EXTREME problem with spammers.

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coincrazed

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Hey guys. I have my own forum, and in the past couple months it's grown to 30 members. My real problem right now is spammers. I have these two guys whom I think are in cahoots with each other, and they keep spamming my forums with advertisements to their online stores. I warned them, but they continued to spam, even more persistently before I warned them, flooding my most popular forum with their advertisements. I permanently banned their IP's, e-mails, etc. AND deleted their accounts. Well, they keep coming back. I have no idea how, but I know they are the same people as they continue to advertise the same online stores. My question to you guys is, what should I do? They keep harassing us! And to help the rest of you guys, here is a list of spammers usernames to watch out for:

"Operahy12"
"Premie"
"mfkwea861"
"Marry101"
"Efgh747"
"Nopq522"
"Pqrst"

A couple of thase usernames I do not remember the numbers they had after them. That should be enough. If one or more of these guys with the same usernames or with similar usernames join your forum, I suggest you IMMEDIATELY ban them. Please help. - coincrazed
 
They could be spam bots, make sure that you have register questions and recapatcha on your forum.

Questions such as : What color is the sky?
Whats 2+2-1=?

Bots can not answer those types of questions.
 
If this is for your free hosted forum in your sig then you are a bit stuck since you can't add mods and if they are running an out of date version of phpBB3 which i think they are then you don't have access to the CAPTCHA plugin system which has Recaptcha + a q&a.

If your free host is running phpBB 3.0.6 or above then when you log into the acp, you should see this on the left - "CAPTCHA module settings" If not then you will have to adjust the difficulty of the default captcha (i can't remember what page that was on in pre phpBB 3.0.6). It might be that your host has stopped you from editing these settings also (although i don't think even free hosts are that restrictive that they hard CAPTCHA settings)
 
Fowler said:
If this is for your free hosted forum in your sig then you are a bit stuck since you can't add mods and if they are running an out of date version of phpBB3 which i think they are then you don't have access to the CAPTCHA plugin system which has Recaptcha + a q&a.

If your free host is running phpBB 3.0.6 or above then when you log into the acp, you should see this on the left - "CAPTCHA module settings" If not then you will have to adjust the difficulty of the default captcha (i can't remember what page that was on in pre phpBB 3.0.6). It might be that your host has stopped you from editing these settings also (although i don't think even free hosts are that restrictive that they hard CAPTCHA settings)
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I am using an Involve Boards hosted forum and when I go to the ACP, nothing comes up about "Mods". What are the best hosts to use? Is Involve Boards out of date?
 
I didn't ask you to find anything about mods. Can you enable feeds for your forum? When you log into the acp, look at the left hand side for "Feed Settings". If you can't find that then you are using a version of phpbb before phpBB 3.0.6 as phpBB3 introduced feeds and the captcha plugins. If you can see the feed settings link then above that is the "CAPTCHA module settings" link which is what i told you to look for first time.

As for best hosts, don't use a free forum host and instead get a webhost and upload and install a forum software yourself. It is alot easier then it sounds.
 
I'd think any host would not limit CAPTCHA options; it's in their best interest to block spam as well since it's useless traffic and bandwidth for them.

One thing you could do is block the URLs of their websites so that at least they can't use those, and also, I'd install a link/sig disabler for accounts under a certain number of posts. These are really the only kinds of things that work for human spammers.
 
Acorn said:
I'd think any host would not limit CAPTCHA options; it's in their best interest to block spam as well since it's useless traffic and bandwidth for them.

One thing you could do is block the URLs of their websites so that at least they can't use those, and also, I'd install a link/sig disabler for accounts under a certain number of posts. These are really the only kinds of things that work for human spammers.
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I wouldn't be surprised what hosts disable to be honest.

Also he can't install anything... He is on a free forum host.
 
Ugggh. Well, when I was on Proboards, I remember there WERE a lot of mods and a lot of options you could install to deter robot spammers. They were freely available codes and they did work.

Not sure what Involveboards' deal is though. But it should always be looked into.
 
IP ban the spammers, email ban them, and ban their accounts.

Good?

If your host blocks this you need to move to a new host.
 
Blocking individual emails and IPs are pointless. It is better to block whole IP ranges (if possible without affecting legit users) and email domains (again if the email domain is not used by legit users). Don't block gmail but you could block the temporary email domains and domains like @chongsoft.org

Very rarely do you personally get spam again from the same IP and/or email.
 
In phpBB3 you can use a simple required field. I use a simple dropdown menu that asks if the user is a spam bot. The default is set to yes, so unless the user simply switches the answer, they are denied registration. I never see spam bots on any of my site, occasionally a human spammer but there isn't much you can do about that.
 
Censor their domains.

Do you require email verification for someone to start posting?
 
Guys, guys...... I'm not a computer techie- have no idea how to use software. Don't you have to pay for it? Anyway, I moved my forum to freeforums.org, which is a lot better than that outdated involveboards.
 
ChrisG2010 said:
They could be spam bots, make sure that you have register questions and recapatcha on your forum.

Questions such as : What color is the sky?
Whats 2+2-1=?

Bots can not answer those types of questions.
Click to expand...
Thats the best solution. I fully agree they are 90% bots since there is a number after their username.
 
ah my bad my friend had this problem 300/307 members were spammers and 99% of posts were links to dodgey sites. In the end he swapped to paid hosting. Stopped the problem when he installed the anti spam mods
 
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