I noticed this morning that Craig has implemented a "Spam Hammer"! (see the bottom of the forum home page) 32 spam attacks thwarted today. Wow. Thanks Craig!!!
In case you're wondering, the spam hammer is still active - I just made it so the stats no longer show on the main page. It's a bit of an unnecessary distraction and eyesore.
You won't see it coz "I just made it so the stats no longer show on the main page." It showed for a time at the bottom of the main forum page - just a counter showing how many spammers had been blocked. It was superfluous to show the counter, so I removed it. The plugin is still doing its job in the background.
ok, thanks. I didn't know what a spam hammer is, so didn't realise it was a list of stats only. Damn, I thought I was going to get to press a button and do some spam some damage ;-) Fantastic work as always. I remember that time here when the spam was flowing thick and fast in the forums, a very low point.
Is spam the reason why new posts have to be reviewed by a moderator before they are shown in the forum? Does this only happen with the first couple of posts of a new member, or are all posts checked out first? I am asking because this is marking conversation very slow…
Hi Manfred. Yes, the first few posts from new members are moderated to ensure spam posts are not created. In fact, your last couple of posts went through without moderation, including the one I'm replying to now. Our moderators will tell you what a nightmare spammers were creating for this forum before I implemented these kinds of strategies.
Hi Craig, I know this problem very well. We are using a phpBB-board. Therefore I do not know which options your vBulletin board is offering. But I can tell you, what we have done: -We limited the registration attempts to 10 per IP -We limited the login attempts to 3 per IP -We are using a question-and-answer captcha with 4 random questions and exchange the questions frequently -The by far most effective thing we did was to establish a blacklist of domains that are not allowed for new registrations. We have blocked all gmail.com and hotmail.com accounts and all .ru domains. To that list we are constantly adding domains of aggressive spammers. Now we have almost no problems with spam bots anymore. What we still have to fight against are real people who try to promote their own websites or are working for “Google optimizer” companies on the rankings of their customers. You are sure as tired of the always same procedure as we are: 10 sense free short posts for camouflage and then 3 advertising links… They should all be keelhauled for wasting our life time.