Too much spam
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Bryn
On my old forum, I had admin approval up which helps ward off potential spambots. Just the CAPTCHA isn't enough these days :\
Most forums has tools or mods which I think work pretty good to stop the majority of the spam bots. 
The problem is the human spammers, those are much harder - if not impossible - to stop. And I don't want to block IPs. I guess you can only stop those human spammers with a good mod team, or maybe by using various posting rules that hides posts from newly registered users before they have been greenlit by a mod.
The problem is the human spammers, those are much harder - if not impossible - to stop. And I don't want to block IPs. I guess you can only stop those human spammers with a good mod team, or maybe by using various posting rules that hides posts from newly registered users before they have been greenlit by a mod.
One thing I noticed is that the IPs hitting me seemed to be part of botnets, at-least according to the spam lookup sites I consulted, so they're probably machines infected with a virus.
There are plenty of things you can do. Block emails, IPs, etc.
There are also tools which lets you delete all of an account's posts at once.
One thing which some software do is hide posts which get lots of reports (e.g. Discourse), although I feel like it could be abused if used against established / known to not be bad users, so maybe that could only be applied to brand new users with like three posts.
There are plenty of things you can do. Block emails, IPs, etc.
There are also tools which lets you delete all of an account's posts at once.
One thing which some software do is hide posts which get lots of reports (e.g. Discourse), although I feel like it could be abused if used against established / known to not be bad users, so maybe that could only be applied to brand new users with like three posts.
did that many times, yet they use VPN, they chnage emails then they come back. So end of the day I try and block all in the htaccess. It's an pain but they will get bored of it at some point.
One thing you can do, if you're a programmer, is invent little novel things for them to trip over.
Remember. Spambots are computer programs, they aren't omnipotent, so they likely have situations they can't handle, especially considering that their developers likely don't have the time to code for every possibility.
I would have to consider whether these are manual spammers, or if they're sending your questions off somewhere, there was one virus which forced people to solve CAPTCHAs or they'd be locked out of their machines.
Remember. Spambots are computer programs, they aren't omnipotent, so they likely have situations they can't handle, especially considering that their developers likely don't have the time to code for every possibility.
I would have to consider whether these are manual spammers, or if they're sending your questions off somewhere, there was one virus which forced people to solve CAPTCHAs or they'd be locked out of their machines.
The trickiest ones go after larger sites. Also, they're smart enough to throw the questions into Google which has all sorts of machine learning algorithms to tear them apart and spit out the answer.
Yeah, I have a similar experience. But you also use IPB, right? That automatic spam filter from IPS is extremely good at stopping spammers (sometimes too good!)
correct IPB has it built into the system that does stop. If it's been setup right. Even then it doesn't stop the human bots
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