bogus automated forum signups
- Thread starter sailor
- Start date
Woohoo Jeff!
Tell me about it. This is actually a new type of spam you CANNOT protect yourself from. At least you are not going to get rid of it easy.
How it happens:
The account-signing process is accomplished by real humans, so email and image verification processes are by-passed without sweat. These accounts then submitted to a spam-generating script to play with.
How to prevent it:
You cannot stop it at source, banning email domains and IPs won't be effective as well. Here are a couple of things to help yourself. Since most of this spam generate new threads, create a permission that would allow users to create new threads only in the event of them having replied to other threads first. I had colleagues telling me it helped reduce the number of them.
If you run vBulletin, I came across this mod today (Mark of AvidInteractive actually pointed me to it):
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=109258
It allows the system to analyze the post for certain words and send posts to recycle bin should the words of interest match with the content of a post.
Hope this gives a couple of ideas.
Tell me about it. This is actually a new type of spam you CANNOT protect yourself from. At least you are not going to get rid of it easy.
How it happens:
The account-signing process is accomplished by real humans, so email and image verification processes are by-passed without sweat. These accounts then submitted to a spam-generating script to play with.
How to prevent it:
You cannot stop it at source, banning email domains and IPs won't be effective as well. Here are a couple of things to help yourself. Since most of this spam generate new threads, create a permission that would allow users to create new threads only in the event of them having replied to other threads first. I had colleagues telling me it helped reduce the number of them.
If you run vBulletin, I came across this mod today (Mark of AvidInteractive actually pointed me to it):
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=109258
It allows the system to analyze the post for certain words and send posts to recycle bin should the words of interest match with the content of a post.
Hope this gives a couple of ideas.
This is a great addition if you have vB3.6.* http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=124828, that sure knocks em off the scale 
Failing that, banning emal addresses is good. There is a huge list of them at http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27175. Obviously some of those you can't ban from signup, but if you get a bunch from certain IPs, then ban the IP We CAN beat em!
Failing that, banning emal addresses is good. There is a huge list of them at http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27175. Obviously some of those you can't ban from signup, but if you get a bunch from certain IPs, then ban the IP We CAN beat em!
country-tyme
New member
Installed the humanizer and visual verification and haven't had any problems since. Things were really out of hand. There is a way around the humanizer if someone is really persistant, but most spam signups up bot related.
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