Increase in spammer sign ups?

[Katrina]

Has anyone else noticed a huge increase of spammers registering on your forums? I had to change our site to have my approval for all registrations because of the large number of spammers daily and I recall this happening the last 2 years around this time as well.

 

[meetdilip]

You don't use " I am not a robot " ?

 

[Deathstarr]

I see the registering of them but do not have any effects over them due to the spam guards that are in place with the forum software I use.

Xenforo.
I have Stop Forum Spam as well as Recaptcha installed and SPS stops 99.9% of them, if one does get in a post I can use the spam controls on him and he goes away.

 

[Katrina]

You don't use " I am not a robot " ?

We have it implemented and they still sign up.

I see the registering of them but do not have any effects over them due to the spam guards that are in place with the forum software I use.

Xenforo.
I have Stop Forum Spam as well as Recaptcha installed and SPS stops 99.9% of them, if one does get in a post I can use the spam controls on him and he goes away.

Have you noticed an increase in their sign ups the past week?

 

[l3ta]

We also get a lot of those plus the usual members who register but never post. I'm now manually approving all registrations and deleting members with zero posts.

 

[meetdilip]

Human spammers are almost impossible to stop. Some webmasters ask questions from the niche. But if they can find the answer through Google, it might not work.

 

[Mastersly]

I have about 900-1000 bots views on my forum per day but they dont register because i have captcha and security answer on registration page

 

[Carlos X]

Have you noticed an increase in their sign ups the past week?

I have xenForo 2.1 installed on all my boards, and we have the same issue, even with reCaptcha 2. I really wish xenForo installed reCaptcha 3 to see if it solves any of the issues. I'll turn on SolveMedia again, soon. I wanted them to get the issues ironed out before proceeding. It was having server errors sometimes.

Google's server reliability is top-notch, but they are not very good on other areas. reCaptcha is one of them.

What I did is put honeypot/stopforumspam API's onto my board so it would mitigate the spam for me. I see the approval queue with 3 to 10 per week, but if they come through, I just IP discourage/ban their accounts. Keep doing it until it goes to a respectable level of comfort. The more you block their access, the more they start thinking "This site has an active admin." But worse than that, if they spent money to buy accounts, they e-mail you asking you to pay them back. I'm looking at those e-mails with "What the fuck? You paid to post on my board? HAHAHAHA.hahahaha. What an idiot."

No, really, that did happen. People register, sell them, try to link on the site in question, and loses because I'm the active admin. Notice, that every time they do, there's a new IP address after they register? It's a spammer.

 

[Jason76]

It never happens to mine cause I use a "question and answer" thing at registration.

Well, it happens occasionally on the math one - but it's not a bot I think. It's just some dummy posting a math question with a link in the question.

 

[Deathstarr]

We have it implemented and they still sign up.




Have you noticed an increase in their sign ups the past week?

I have not, I have had less in the past month or so. I also use Cloudflare to clean traffic as well as I have a robots.txt that kills even more traffic and search engines.

My forum I am referring is a local US state related so I do not have to have traffic from other countries or outside the US.

 

[Katrina]

Our owner added another question to be answered during registration so I'll see if that helps any. They're mostly coming from the Russian Federation and they fill out their profiles the same way (for Biography they put Man) but they do put in different things in other fields.

 

[KnownSyntax]

I haven't noticed a large trend to more spammer signups, but I think regardless there will always be some sneak through. Some are humans who then add it to their spambot automation, while others are just full spambots.

I've found with the Q&A registration setting, it can be hard to make a good question since it cannot be obvious, but also cannot be too specific to yor niche since someone new might not know the correct technical term/answer for it.

 

[vans]

I have google captcha for registring. Even though my forum has been online just for 2 days, I never got any bot registring (even when I was in testing for months, none bot/spammers account were registred).

 

[Katrina]

We had over 100 new spammer registrations one day! We had tried Captcha and random questions and then changed it to the New Captcha and now we're at only 3 a day so whew!! We had 2 new real members amongst all that and I had to make sure they got approved and not banned as I went through it all.

 

[Page]

Are you or anyone getting accounts using email addresses lavarip.xyz ???? I get a lot of that but they get removed after 30 days since they can not activate the email address link LOL

But I blocked the site so I get no more.

 

[Katrina]

Are you or anyone getting accounts using email addresses lavarip.xyz ???? I get a lot of that but they get removed after 30 days since they can not activate the email address link LOL

But I blocked the site so I get no more.

We've really only had a few with that type of email address. Yandex is one of our big ones and I immediately no it's not a real member wanting to talk about Christianity 😉

 

[Carlos X]

We've really only had a few with that type of email address. Yandex is one of our big ones and I immediately no it's not a real member wanting to talk about Christianity 😉

You're right. With xenForo 2.1, you can block wildcard e-mails (anything before the @domain.com prefix, so if you ban *@domain, it will ban anything attached to @domain.com).

 

[Katrina]

You're right. With xenForo 2.1, you can block wildcard e-mails (anything before the @domain.com prefix, so if you ban *@domain, it will ban anything attached to @domain.com).

Another good reason to put Christianity Haven on Xenforo!

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I’ve always had really good luck with security questions. Make it hard for boys, easy for humans by directing them to a certain public page/post on the forum and input the 3rd and 12th words in the first paragraph or something like that. 🙂

 

[meetdilip]

Invisible CAPTCHA is catching up. They say it is better than v2. I haven't seen much implementations though.