Forum Spammers

[Admin]

Just to give you an idea if you are thinking of starting up a forum, AD has had 39,802 new user registration attempts since 4th September 2008.

2,881 have been allowed to register, the rest considered as spam attempts.

Even some of those have been deleted after they started posting (usually posting rubbish just to get a Do Follow signature link).

Thanks to my mods for helping me keep AD spammer free behind the scenes, and members please do PM me if you see one getting past us!

Admin

 

[rjs_essex]

I delete new users all the time... Not because I'm anti-social... A fair few manage to slip through the cracks and I'm just not that big a fan of spiced ham!

Rich

 

[blether]

I run a forum for smallholders at http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/ and only about 1 in 4 of our registrations are genuine, and I thought that was a high ratio!

Most members don't appreciate the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep a popular forum clean, thanks to admin and mods at Acorn.

 

[Edwin]

Interesting to see how many spammers try and sign up here! I run a discussion forum with 18,916 registered users (and close to 500,000 posts) and over the years there have been 762 people banned for spamming. I guess I must have it pretty easy by comparison...

 

[WaftyCrank]

What about this spam?
http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/top-l...ion-3-character-com-domains-11z-com-more.html

 

[jimm]

What topic area is that Edwin?
I have some car brand specific forums where I get 1 in 10 spammers (9 good people to 1 spammer)! but equally I have some technology specific forums where i get 1 in 100 real people!
Quite interesting the way certain areas seem to attract spammers.

 

[retired_member13]

What about this spam?
http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/top-l...ion-3-character-com-domains-11z-com-more.html

I don't see what this person adds to the Forum - they just spam Sedo auction link after link after link with no relevance to the UK at all.

 

[AssetDomains]

Had to take the forum attached to one of my poker portals down this weekend.
Had a few antispam protection measures installed but over the last week they failed horribly 2k new users and 80k spam posts to loads of dodgy sites.
The forum section was never really used much anyway so I've just removed the directory for now.
I am having trouble getting Google to de-index the entire forum though got to go and have a play with robots.txt now.

 

[expertc]

Yep! Spammers are everywhere I have a chemical forum on phpBB and came-up with a solution. I don't think it might be good in here, but for me it worked straight away. Forum is Chemical (!), the reg is free but to make a post user should answer a very simple chemical question (changed randomly). Anyone who has any idea about the industry has no problem at all. Questions are like this: "What is the chemical formula of Calcium Chloride?", "What does COA mean?", etc. System sets a cookie so only one answer per day is required.

I had NO spam for several months now

 

[WaftyCrank]

Good job I'm already a member, I wouldn't even be able to answer those.

 

[expertc]

Good job I'm already a member, I wouldn't even be able to answer those.

Members are also answering But had no complaints, for a chemical pro it's just as easy as for domainers to answer something like "What country .de belongs to?"

 

[blether]

Yep! Spammers are everywhere I have a chemical forum on phpBB and came-up with a solution. I don't think it might be good in here, but for me it worked straight away. Forum is Chemical (!), the reg is free but to make a post user should answer a very simple chemical question (changed randomly).

Absolutely, it doesn't need to be complicated. Anything that's an extra requirement beyond the vanilla phpBB/VB/SMF registration process will defeat most bots.

 

[doodlebug]

Yep! Spammers are everywhere I have a chemical forum on phpBB and came-up with a solution. I don't think it might be good in here, but for me it worked straight away. Forum is Chemical (!), the reg is free but to make a post user should answer a very simple chemical question (changed randomly). Anyone who has any idea about the industry has no problem at all. Questions are like this: "What is the chemical formula of Calcium Chloride?", "What does COA mean?", etc. System sets a cookie so only one answer per day is required.

I had NO spam for several months now

Excellent idea but 2 things >
1, what about newbies ?
2, surely spammers could quickly Google the answer

 

[expertc]

Excellent idea but 2 things >
1, what about newbies ?
2, surely spammers could quickly Google the answer

1. Newbies are googling the answers
2. Spammers are busy spamming other forums, so if they need to google something just to post, they simply move on... I guess :wink:

 

[blether]

2, surely spammers could quickly Google the answer

True, but you'll never stop the manual, determined spammer from signing up to forums and posting whatever you do. The benefit of this approach is it stops the majority of the automated spam registrations.

 

[doodlebug]

True, but you'll never stop the manual, determined spammer from signing up to forums and posting whatever you do. The benefit of this approach is it stops the majority of the automated spam registrations.

Fair play, I guess it cuts down on spam

ps. would like to buy some m4le C@ck Gr0w!ng pill5 :lol:

 

[Edwin]

What topic area is that Edwin?

Email services. People talking about particular email providers, problems, hints and tips for use, new service announcements and the like.

I have a draconian policy on both signatures and advertising: neither are allowed, period. Means that a spammer glancing through a few threads before signing up is almost certainly going to notice that the forum is much "cleaner" than other forums. It also makes it 100% clear when someone is spamming, so the moderators and I will get a problem report within a couple of minutes.

I've combined that with 3 "are you human" tests. A captchka, plus two simple questions like the ones below (not the actual questions, but similar idea):
A) Please enter the third letter of the word "yellow" in the box below
B) Please enter the fifth letter of the word "dinosaur" in the box below

Most spam accounts are created manually by bots, so the above beats all such attempts as they're not going to bother to change their programming just for my forum when there are millions of other easier targets out there.

 

[crabfoot]

One site I use asks me to fill in a captcha from time to time when I have to moderate something ... I wouldn't mind, but I'm already double logged in to do the job!

 

[lufc]

I ran a pritty big Leeds United Forum and before it got shut down I would recieve around 500 spam accounts a week. It was a phpbb forum and was a nightmare to mod/admin.

I now run another forum which users vbulletin and it is so much easier to mod/admin.

Just like to adds my thanks to admin and the mods of this forum.

Darren