Preventing/Banning Spammers
 

I've noticed recently a huge influx of spammers selling viagra, tampons, etc on our forum. I was thinking of ways to limit this:

1) Make it more difficult to register (ie instead of just verification email ... have them physically put in verification codes when typing in their pertinent info, etc)

2) Allow new members to post only in a "Newbie forum" to introduce themselves and say hi, THEN after a grace period (1 week) allow them to post in other sections

3) Likely these spammers are a handful of people who are registrying under different names ... ban the IP addresses that they are coming from

4) Impliment an instant BAN for posting spam

I realize this would be more work for the administrators and mods but would definitely make our forum much cleaner. Also, I know that this might scare away newbies but those that are really interested/motivated will go through the trouble.

I agree with everything except the 1 week grace period.

^^ Ha ha ... I was being mean with the grace period. I figure, if I was a spammer, I would not have the patience to wait a week just to spam ... I'd just go to the rsx club and spam there instead of waiting.

theres a number of ways to defeat the spammers.

1. scan newly seen ip addresses for open proxies. Prevent posts if a user is sporting them.

2. put a timer on posts. you keep track of when the user hit 'post reply' till the reply is sent. If you prevent posts issued within 5 - 10 secs, it will stop almost all automated spam posts since they are generated directly to the submit post op, and don't go through the reply page first.

3. limit newly created users (less than a week) from being able to submit new threads without first having an admin validate and approve the thread. so new users can make them, but they are hidden till approved.

I do all three of those on searchirc.com and haven't gotten any spam in a long time. Of course it's still POSSIBLE, but the chances of it happening is close to nil and regular users aren't adversely effected.

can I interest you in an ipod for $40??

Damn, i missed the tampon thread? All I ever see is the viagra ones :mad:

Great ideas guys, I do have to admit it is annoying as hell to have spam on here.. being a newbie myself I would go through this stuff to join, I was quite surprised that I didnt have to do much to get a userid and log in.

This is an idea that we've talked about. I think it's a good one.

We have discussed an idea similar to this and decided not to do it. There are many people that are truly interested in the RX-8 and the rotary who have questions or comments they'd like to get across and don't want to wait a week to do it.

We already do this. There are just millions of them.

When already do this too.

Spammers are a royal pain in the ass. Many of them come out at night or on weekends when we aren't around as much to deal with them. They are also getting more creative. It's obvious that some of them are actually people from the way they are doing this. I've seen someone ask a question about the car but covertly have a link to their site in the post. These are harder to catch as the titles look fairly innocent. The newest trick is to ask mindless repetitive questions about the car and then never respond to the threads. While these appear innocent they like to add a link to their website in their signature which they display. These are borderline as they are technically real questions so I can't ban them just for this. The one time I do it'll be a person who was honestly asking a question who just happened to not understand the rules. I just delete their ability to have a signature and that takes care of them.

Most of the spam threads appear in the RX-8 discussion section as it's the first one down. They almost always have the information icon posted next to them. It's a dead giveaway. These are very easy to catch and most of them only post once and then go away. It's the spam that is posted by an actual person that is harder to keep up with as they'll usually go to 4 or 5 different sections. Many times I'm fast enough to ban them while they are typing their next one. Sometimes they come right back. Only an admin can ban an IP address. Not even a supermod can and there are only a couple of them and they aren't always online. All we can really do until they get around to it is to keep banning names. We do need to deal with this problem more. Believe me, it sucks trying to deal with it all and I take care of alot of it.

rotarygod, let me be the first to say I think you're doing an excellent job. I read a lot of different forums during down time at work.

Most are littered with spam that stays in place for hours/days. These are some of the cleanest forums around and I know the work you must put into keeping it that way.

Keep up the great work!!

Naw, guys one of the problems is you guys use vBulletin.
It's popular software, so they can just send in php queries to make posts.

I don't think it's worth it to switch software, but the only real defense against spamming is to have more active mods on.

Spammers are subject to the same pages we are. But as I said, they can submit direct to the "postreply" op instead of going through the "newreply" op first. Thus my suggestion about a timer count from "newreply" op would completely eliminate anyone posting directly to the server.

I don't suppose there is an option to limit the amount of accounts per IP addy?

Thanks for the input RotaryGod ... I know you guys do a great job in cleaning it up and I'm sure we all commend you guys. I like some of those other ideas that mysql101 suggested.

Spammers are the worst! There was a documentary I saw on spam and apparently they caught a fellow who's day job was to spam spam spam ... the part that got me is when the fellow said to the police "I'm doing my job. I'm doing nothing wrong". Hey, I wonder if some of those commercials you see on "making money from home with your computer" are actually recruiting spammers????

Not quite recruiting spammers. More like selling "how to spam" kits that are just as good a deal as the meds and other crap the spammers try to sell. Look at how much of the spam is inept - clearly sent by a sucker who bought a kit.

Speaking of the "I'm doing my job" attitude...remember the immigration lawyers who invented spam? I don't think they won any of their lawsuits against the ISP's who cancelled their account. They did, however, write a book telling how to spam and whining about how they had been picked on.

Ken

doesn't matter - they don't post that frequently anyway. They just need one post per ip and they will have millions of possible ips they can use. So even if you limit 1 post per ip, the problem will remain.

don't worry boys, I'll just start using my Jedi Powers to PWN all the spammer!


http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d3...darthfight.gif





(aka continuing to click the "report" button on their posts)

Links....
 

The problem isn't really the spammer, it's the payload, the payoff, the "Link".

....a spam post without it's link is just useless, like a missile without it's warhead - it's a dud.

You just don't find spam without links; what's the point?

So just remove the ability to have a link in a post for the first week/ten posts/whatever.

S

Actually, spam is frequently sent without links. For pump and dump stocks, they just need a few people to buy some crappy low volume stock to make a profile. No link needed.

Email spam is also frequently sent without links, or with random text, like shakespeare quotes. We don't know the reason for this, but it's assumed they do this to retrain spam filters on a mass scale.


On a forum... it doesn't always need users to click and buy, the links can help give anchor text for a site to raise pagerank. But yeah, this reminds me that I also prevent anything containing http or www from being posted by new registered users. That'll help a lot too.

oh.. this thread reminds me... another kind of scum:

http://img.ircimages.com/ircimages/b...210b41b09e.jpg

I'm on another forum that put in a 10 post count minimum to start new threads. It killed 95% of the spam, and keeps new users from making dumb threads without searching first.