Forum Spam Signups

daz

daz

daz

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
24,081
Location
Bucks
Recently I've been getting a number of spam sign-ups on my Vbulletin forum - the usual email sort of stuff, offering pharmaceutical drugs, dating services and the like. I've been pretty quick to jump on most of them, and I have banned a number of IP addresses, but they seem to come from random ones, most likely through proxies, so it doesn't have too much effect. I would imagine that these aren't bots because they're going through the image verification... I have turned "Moderate new members" on, which means I have to approve people before they can post... are there any other steps I can take as well as/instead of this?
 
if you're getting signups that are being done manually (pretty unlikely), then there's nothing you can do about it. moderating new members isn't a bad idea anyway - i'd do it by default if i ran a forum.
 
I have the same problem with my phpBB forums - I don't get as many as I used to but they still appear.
They only do it so they can post their URL in their signatures and profiles.

I make sure that the system whereby all new users have to click a link in an e-mail is the only way they can activate their account.
At least this means that I've got a known working e-mail address for a user if they are activated - somebody to actually complain to.

Other than that I just make sure I spend five minutes a day checking for new sign-ups and deleting those which are obviously fake.
Annoying and time-consuming but alas there are some real ***** out there.
 
Someone mentioned in a previous thread that by changing some of the variable names it stops the bots from automatically ticking the box that skips them through the image check.
 
Well the email address verification has always been on, which is why I thought it was manual. In any case, I'm manually reviewing sign-ups since yesterday which should hopefully quell any more spammers.
 
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