Obviously, we have a problem w/spammers popping up here. It's unclear how many are bots and how many are human. My Nissan Leaf Forum • View topic - We should demand a better run forum. listed the practices of some other forum. Is something like the first part done here? For those who run/are mods of other forums, perhaps they can enlighten us as to what's effective. Is this a solution in search of a problem or just a minor issue for the current moderators?
I report spam almost every morning, and it goes away fairly quickly. I hope there is not a large bell over Danny's bed.
I observed during your night time (yours in USA - in Europe our clocks are few hours ahead) - the enormous number of new members being registered. This is the time (something between yours - US East Coast time 02A.M. till 06A.M.) when the activity of the spambots is on it's top.
I'm real. At least.....I think I am.... I haven't seen much SPAM personally, and Danny hasn't kicked me off of the forum (yet) so there's obviously room for improvement, but this is one of the better run forums I've seen. Still and all......there is always something to be gained from taking a peek at how other folks do it...
I have a few addons that stop about 98% of spam registrations. The moderator crew and I pretty effectively stop the other 2% before any spam posts go public. It's rare that a spammy link ever makes it public, but it happens every once in a while, though it usually doesn't remain public for very long. The addons do a few things- 1) Blocks all user agents that appear on BadBehavior database ( http://bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ ) 2) Check IP/email against stopforumspam database (http://www.stopforumspam.com/ ) 3) New members who post any link must also get through Akismet check 4) Registrations must take a certain amount of time to complete, too fast and they are rejected 5) I manually approve new accounts after email confirmation, checking IP addresses and emails for anything suspicious 6) All posts by uncomfirmed, unregistered and new accounts awaiting approval are put into a moderation queue for mods to check before approving Based on logs, the automated plugins reject thousands of bots every day. Those that make it through face human anti-bot measures. Step 6 takes me about 5-10 minutes each morning and evening every day, but on a busy forum, I think it's the best way. I catch a lot of IPs and suspicious emails from the far east that never get a chance to spam, even though they made it through all the other automated systems. Any that submit a post before I do my 2-3x daily approvals are checked by the moderator crew who only allow legitimate sounding questions and comments to be made public. I'm on an older version of vBulletin like PriusChat had previously, so I'm sure the newer version and Xenforo have superior anti-spam plugins.
