Banning an unknown user?!

[Casper]

5 times a day for the last 4 weeks a user has been attempting to register on my forum. Everyday he creates new accounts with different usernames and email addresses (only 3 of the email address he has verified), the only consistency is that the birth date is ALWAYS JAN 1 1980. The forum is closed to the public because it is used for a private school. So, basically nobody except students, parents or faculty can register.

What can I do to prevent this unknown user from bombarding the site with false accounts?

Thanks for your help!

[Peggy]

My first thought would be to ban the IP address.

[Casper]

Saddly, the address changes each time he access the site... :/

[Dave A]

Do a search on spam or spammers here. We've had a lot of discussion on this sort of thing.

It is probably a bot program. Apart from working on the human verification permissions and some of the other suggestions you will find here, the ISBOT mod available on vB.og is pretty effective.

[PoetJC]

Try NoSpam! for vBulletin
I've heard vB 3.7 implements a similar system.
I haven't upgraded just yet - so can't say - but I've only heard wonderful things about NoSpam! for vB 3.6.8 PL2 - I can tell ya - it works a treat and since I've installed it - I've never seen any spambots - It's an incredible modification.

Jacquii.

[mikesz]

This is a well known Chinese Forum Spambot (actually, I think he is one of the Russian Spammers relocated to Shanghai using a block of Chinese IP addresses, its got a similar footprint behavior of the Russian badguys before they went missing last year. I heard they were negotiating for Chinese IP addresses). The theory is that he is using CURL to access forums directly to register and do a PM spam. I think code has been implemented to fix that in the latest 3.7.1. vb.com is full of stuff about this freak. He is pretty notorious, spamming thousands of vb sites. If you check, he is using different IP addresses for each registration.

I have a custom spam filter that checks the registration content and smokes him as soon as it sees the birthday and the timezone that he uses to register.

HTH,

mikesz
allaboutdatingsites.com