vbulletin forum spam

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18 Oct 2002
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161
Hi there. I run a small vbulletin forum for our sports clubs website. Over the last few months, we are getting an increasing amount of spam on the forums. Each week we are in the double figures of people registering and posting spam on the forums, only for us to delete their thread and membership.

We have set email activation for new members, as well as the "enter a security code" feature on registering, so I am guessing the registrations are being done manually, with email accounts that are active at the time of registration.

Does anyone else suffer from this problem? Does anyone have any advise they could offer to help elevate it?

Cheers – Mark
 
If you're running newer than 3.6.4, ensure True Type fonts are enabled for the image verification.

Additionally, have a look on vbulletin.org for a plugin called NoSpam!

It replaces (or compliments) the standard image verification, and allows you, as the administrator, to generate as simple or complicated questions and answers that only a human can respond to, and not a bot.

For example, the question might be "What is two plus two?" and the answer could be "four" or "4". You could also do "Type "hello" into the box", and providing the user types "hello" then it'll pass - there aren't any bots that I know of yet that can get past this kind of verification!

I co-run a couple of vB forums, and our daily new member/spam count went from ~30 per day to 0 per day! :)
 
I'd say 99% of spam on forums is bots. You can also stop quite a lot of it by blocking @mail.ru email addresses! ;)

Many of them also get past the image verification by displaying the image on a porn site, where humans fill in the number in order to get onto the site!

NoSpam is a great addin - definitely the best that I've installed to either of the vB forums I run.
 
ConfusedTA said:
Many of them also get past the image verification by displaying the image on a porn site, where humans fill in the number in order to get onto the site!

Wow, I didn't know that's how it worked.
 
I installed the nospam feature shortly after being advised to do so in this thread. Since doing so, I have had just 1 member register and post spam on my forums. Thanks for the advise!
 
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