Dealing with spam.

[iDad]

Gotta love iPhone I'm on it now lol

[agentmoeller]

But what if I want generic Viagra from Canada?

[Hoogle]

well this is the wrong place to look for it google is your best bet lol

[dv8_fx]

But what if I want generic Viagra from Canada?

Good Question..... it's cheaper.... lol...


We're begining to dv8 from topic , guys....

[Hoogle]

Yeah stop spamming my spam thread lol Back on topic from now..

[Zeealex]

good to know you are still allowed a sense of humour though hoogle, other forum (not this forum) admins apparently werent :/

but anyway, on topic

[Shawn Gossman]

If I may suggest, Q&A anti-spam methods are the best I have seen for blocking out spam...

I run a lot of forums myself I run vb, ipb, smf and mybb. I probably run 30 of them and will run more too :P Anyways, spam was always an issue so I started trying to methods... CAPTCHA is junk unless you custom make it. The reason CAPTCHA is junk is because its easily broken AND there are services and websites out there that will solve 1000 CAPTCHAs for $1.00 USD. Then that gets put into programs like xrumor which is where the majority of forum and blog spam comes from...

Q&A is something you already have as I noticed on registration, however I think it needs to be adjusted... When I first used Q&A on my forums, I had basic questions like "are you human" and "what color is blue" and all that noise... I noticed spammer getting through. So I tried something new, I made the questions related to my forum's niche (the topic of your forum) and I made them a little hard. Some new members actually had to look the answer up which is simple to do, open a tab, type the question in search and there is a the answer... most xrumor and other spam programs will not do that, they will simply skip your forum and move to the next...

I maybe get 1 spammer every couple on months and I catch them pretty quickly.

And in the end, human intelligence will ALWAYS be the #1 anti-spam method, if you have good forum staff who are active on the forum, they can catch spammers more...

Also, there are plugins for vb4 that enable API usage off Stop Forum Spam (dot com) ;) This blocks A LOT of spammers, it really works however, sometimes it will block real members and that is just the bitter/sweet part of that plugin. I would not enable username scanning with it though as it will block out a lot of real people...

Hope my ramblings have helped :P

[Hoogle]

Well we are actually doing quite well on it I guess we have good forum staff here lol. Rarely do we get spam threads stay active for longer than maybe 10 mins. We currently are approaching 40,000 members with 4 members of staff moderating the forum and the new members. Believe it or not we have approximately 200 new accounts created daily and between the 4 active members of staff we can have 190 of those accounts deleted for being known spammers, multiple accounts inappropriate names or just hidden links somewhere.

Yes I think considering the staff to accounts ratio we do an excellent job (not me blagging there lol) However the 4 regular members of staff here none of them being the actual owner who is tied up on other projects at the moment. But Suggestions are being made on how to improve the site and stop the spam. But we can not implement anything without Big Bosses permission lol.

This site is cared for 24\7 almost But I would definately love something to auto detect all spam and delete them from our system.

[Shawn Gossman]

This site is cared for 24\7 almost But I would definately love something to auto detect all spam and delete them from our system.

Any StopForumSpam modification will do exactly that for you but like I said, it can be bitter/sweet because it sometimes blocks real members. However, it blocks way more spammers than members, haha.