Reply With QuoteGreat guide; great information. Thank you very much for this!
Keep up the great work. With information like this, your forum will definately hit off!
[How To] Stop spam on your forum
We had a big spam problem here on vBFAQ, as well as on some of my other forums. We would ban the spammers and delete their posts - but they would just come back again and again.
Really - we were mostly dealing with BOTs - automated scripts that would register on our forum and spam post once or twice and then be gone. After alot of trial and error, I have come up with the way to minimize the spam on my forums.
Follow these steps below, and you should be able to dramatically reduce the spam on your forum also.
STEP ONE
Ban some email addresses. See this thread: Spam Email addresses to Ban
These are some of the most common spammers. Not all of them by far, but its some of the main ones used by spammers. To ban these email addresses, go to your ADMIN CP > vBULLETIN OPTIONS > USER BANNING OPTIONS > Banned Email AddressesNote that partial email addresses are matched from the end of the address unless you enable "Aggressive Email Banning" below. Therefore if you ban @example.com you will ban user@example.com, but if you ban @example that user will not be banned. If you enable "Aggressive Email Banning", user@example.com would be banned by @example.
If the email address of a user attempting to register or change their email address matches any of the addresses you specify here will see a no-permission error. For example, if you have banned 'example.com' then a user attempting to use 'someone@example.com' will be rejected.STEP TWO
Install the hack Stop the Registration Bots
This mod will check the the time it takes for a vBulletin registration form to be submitted. If the form is submitted faster then humanly possible, the registration will be denied and the admin contact will be emailed about the event. The time is settable, but I suggest you leave it as is.
STEP THREE
For the occasional spam posters that get through the above hack, install this second Hack to Prevent Spam. This hack is misnamed a bit. It doesnt actually prevent spam, it prevents your members from seeing it. This hack automatically scans new posts from new members for common spam keywords. If any are found, the post/thread will be sent to the moderation queue to prevent their spam from having any affect.
I also recommend you install the hack QUICK MODERATION: Moderation queue info on Forums. The reason for this is that with the Hack to Prevent Spam I mentioned above, some moderated posts may be missed by your moderators because a moderated post isn't very obvious. This hack places a small bar just below the navbar that only your staff can see, which alerts your staff that a thread, or post, needs to be moderated. This way, they dont get missed. This is important because you dont want new members' posts to get lost in the moderation queue.
These three easy steps can almost eliminate spam from your forum, and make even less spam viewable to your members. I cannot stress enough that you do all three steps.
If you do all this.... What happens is the vast majority of the spammers wont be able to register. Those that do register, wont be able to post any spam since their posts will trigger the moderation hack and have to be approved by you or your moderators. Thus, 99% of the spam will never actually reach your members.
Last edited by Joeychgo; 06-01-2009 at 08:54 AM.
Great guide; great information. Thank you very much for this!
Keep up the great work. With information like this, your forum will definately hit off!
Sending posts for users with less than three posts to the moderation queue when they include a link seems to do the trick. I don't think this helps a forum "talke off", but it certainly helps an established forum stay "spam free".
-Raymond
Originally Posted by popowich
Yes - but stopping them before the bots register keeps you in good with your moderators - who nag me to do something baout the spam almost daily...
Also a new forum starting out shouldn't be worried about spam. This is for forums that are getting tons of spam on it. I haven't seen to many new forums getting spammed allot.
Excellent tutorial!
Awesome! Thanks a bunch! I like this place!!
I should have known this forum has the answers. Thanks, Peggy!
We try..
Of course we do! Now tell everyone at that other site, lol
I should do it in the thread I started on the original vbulletin forums and tell them "Thanks for nothing, I found my answer HERE". I will if they keep on stalling ...
Stop Spam and Content Harvesting on Your Forum
Yep, it's an old thread, but the subject is long from dead. New ideas and software are becoming available as we continue to fight this battle.
One such peice of software available is GeoIP. There are several coding APIs available for several languages as well as an Apache Module to fight spam and content harvesting on your forum.
Block traffic from countries you don't need to do business from or the countries of origin spamming your forum.
This is not an email solution, but spam assassin and thers are available for that.
Read more on getting Help Stopping Content Harvesting and Spam.
There seems to be a new competition on who can spam the most, as evidenced on my designs forum overnight.
I hadn't replaced all of these spam preventions since upgrading to 3.7
Time to do so!
I've seen a lot more spam lately. There was something with PM spam jumping around several forums i have a web of links between. they are also getting smarter and seem to be blowing past easy nospam questions such as what is 2+5?
-Raymond
Yep. The spam question thing stopped working for me, as far as spam is concerned, long ago. I'm having to get really aggressive now.
Change the 2 + 5 to 2 + 6 - a small change like that is surprisingly effective!
great topic Thanks you
No spam and no bots using Stop the registration bots. It's great.
Possibly in the realm of dumb questions, but to save some pain for me at least
Would we need to uninstall Isbot to install your mod, noppid?
It replaces IsBot. I saw people posting that IsBot was beaten and wrote my own.
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