Persistent forum spammers
 

I've got a small mainstream forum that is being hit by spammers. The site is new and really has little traffic to speak of.

I get people registering and posting porn and pills spam. The messages stay up for less than a couple hours at most before being deleted, so it's not like they are getting any traffic from it.

I've banned a shitload of free email addresses from being able to register, but this person keeps coming back the following day with new ones, mail.ru, mymail.com, mymail.net, etc. I think they'd soon have to run out of free email hosts.

So I'm just wondering are these just bots or is there really someone out there that stupid? Seems like a lot of work for zero payoff, if in fact someone out there is taking the time to register and confirm their email address, etc.

I'm running phpbb, and it has the image confirmation when you register. Are those easy to bypass using bots?

its a forum submitter software
search for xrummer

Whether you approve them or not their "website" or "homepage" links get displayed in your members list.

So if they can sign up, even if they cant post or dont post, they are sending a spider to their shit through your domain. Which is what they are after.

Its software indeed.

Yeah I have to deal with them fuckers on a daily basis also.

It is enough to put additional steps on registration like pick right image and that's it.Never seen a single spammer after implementation of this.

Here is a part solution for that Go into your banned words and type in "spam" or "this is spam" for the words "viagra" and all the other pill names they use. it does stop some of them as when somebody reads the post it will say something like this " Buy cheap spam here"

disable text or anything resembling urls before 30 posts.

I had massive spam problems when using phpbb. After i moved to Vbulletin its reduced with 99%.

There's a number of anti spam mods for phpbb. You should give them a try and see which one performs best for you, for example:

Anti-Spam ACP - This hack prevents spam bots from registering on your forum by removing the fields of your choice in the registration and profile form until users reach certain requirements. If a spam bot is detected, you are sent an e-mail notification with the username, IP address and more.

Thanks for the tips.

I have been deleting the members as they sign up, so they are not showing up in my members lists so they gain no benefit there.

KlenTelaris, I already have image verification require upon registering, that is not stopping them.

I used several anti spam mods when using phpbb. Nothing really stopped it.

Tru dat. However some of the mods may help eliminate at least some part of spammers. Would be better than with no mods whatsoever.

To the OP - since it's a new board, you may consider getting rid of phpbb and trying a different forum script. For example MyBB which gets good reviews or even Vanilla. Phpbb seems to have the rep of being most attacked by spammers. Using different script could prevent that. VBulletin is a good script, but their annual fees make it one of the most expensive scripts ever.

Right, xrumer and all the other spamscripts are just looking for standard installations and will ignore anything with additional security features.

somebody help a newb out here. What's "pick right image"? Link to the mod?

Same here

I'm using VB but I've already done a hack to replace links in a msg with "SPAM" if the user has only posted that one msg. This thread has given me another idea, do something similar for profiles... no hyperlink if they have 0 or 1 posts.

BTW I null routed mail.ru on my server and that's suppressed about 20-30 spam signups per day. Null routing means that my server can no longer connect to the remote address, so the confirmation mail just gets queued and eventually deleted. The signup process cannot be completed, but they never know because the initial registration still succeeds.

I moderate all users. That helps.