vBulletin anti-spam measures

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bwang

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 6, 2011
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So my friend runs a forum with a vBulletin backend, and it's suffering from some pretty bad spam. Anyone know of any effective antispam tools?
 
I help run an older (3.7.8) vbulletin site. We get a decent amount of spammers that register, but only one or two a month that actually post. We use an addon that hooks into stopforumspam http://www.stopforumspam.com/contributions and the best thing we do is make it so you can't post new threads without having 10 posts first. Most bots rarely post to an existing topic as they seem to be scripted to start a new thread with their advertisements. There are some that slip through, but it's easily handled.

The site is pretty small, but I don't think requiring people to have 10 posts before creating new threads is detrimental. Plus, you can always make a "newbietown" or some other section where people under 10 posts do have pemission to post an intro or some such if you really want to. Then, you only really have one place to clean up.
 
The last couple of weeks I have to clean out hundreds of bots signing up on my forums its getting retarded.... I authorize every user so it takes some time ..
 
We use this for one of the websites I manage.
http://www.spamtrawler.net

It works as an application firewall for anything built on PHP. It allows blocking by country, hostname, ip, dns blacklists, the antiwebspam api ad a few other options. It also has the option of setting a cookie on a blocked computer so it gets blocked on its return even if it changes to a new ip address. The cookie option combined with blocking China and Pakistan knocked out about 90% of the spam issues we were having from bots.

The only spam we've been getting lately has been coming from a compromised web server in Canada run by Ubiquity (they refuse to acknowledge there's an issue at all) and almost all of our spam originating in the USA is coming from Las Vegas. My Guess is the spammers just leech wifi out there off the casinos and strip joints.
 
I know at one point, and I don't know if vBulletin allows this customization, but I had set up a phpBB forum and we were getting inundated with spam signups. There was a trick where during signup, you create an extra field in the signup form (in addition to DOB/Name/email/etc) that is invisible, and you require the answer to be blank.

Because bots will often fill text in every form field they can to make sure the registration succeeds, this takes advantage of that and causes most signups to fail because the bots don't know that leaving it blank is a requirement. It's great for users, because they don't even see the field at all, but the bots do.

The bots may be smarter than that now, so I'm not sure how feasible it is as a solution- it seemed to work wonders at the time- better than the original solution which was approving each signup manually. When you have hundreds of bots signing up it gets near-impossible to wade through them to find the one legitimate account to approve.
 
Bloodystumps said:
The last couple of weeks I have to clean out hundreds of bots signing up on my forums its getting retarded.... I authorize every user so it takes some time ..
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THOUSANDS of emails every few days.. I need to turn country blocking back on, on the firewall..
 
I found a site that used an interesting setup. It was a picture puzzle you had to put together. Don't remember the site now.
 
Skillz said:
I found a site that used an interesting setup. It was a picture puzzle you had to put together. Don't remember the site now.
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I remember that one. Its hard for me to find stuff anymore because since i sold my vB licenses my vbulletin.org account is very restricted.
 
I use a combination of the spam-o-matic and areyouahuman.com plugins. I haven't had an issue since switching to vB about 9 months ago. As of right now, there have been 9521 blocked registration attempts.
 
craigbru said:
I use a combination of the spam-o-matic and areyouahuman.com plugins. I haven't had an issue since switching to vB about 9 months ago. As of right now, there have been 9521 blocked registration attempts.
Click to expand...

this work on phpbb ?
 
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