My Forum is getting spammed every now and then. Possible Soultion Please

20 replies
Hello
I have opened a skin beauty forum last month and todate I have more than 600 members but most of them are spammers.

The rate of subscription is increasing day by day and I am not knowing how to control it. If I do it manually then may be I will be spending more than an hour or so to ban them everyday. The time can increase gradually everyday. So Could anyone suggest any step to keep away spammers from my forum.
#forum #soultion #spammed
  • Profile picture of the author WhiteHatDiva
    Do you have any captcha or other "verify you are a human" things in place? What forum script are you using?
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  • Profile picture of the author keyuria
    No, I do not have Captcha and I use SMF Forum Platform.
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  • Profile picture of the author jasonmorgan
    Make your profiles viewable to members only. This will discourage most spammers.

    Make all of your site links nofollow. This will discourage most spammers.

    Regulate signatures based on time or number of posts. This will discourage most spammers.

    Regularly delete accounts that have 0 posts. These are probably spammers.

    Follow up on members with under 5 posts to see if they are spammers.
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  • Profile picture of the author JDArchitecture
    I'm not familiar with SMF features, but most forum software allows you to set a minimum number of posts before a member may post links or attachments. That won't completely eliminate the problem, but it should put a big dent in it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marvin Johnston
    I ran into the same problem on a forum I started. After the spammers found the site, I made it a manual registration approval process instead of automatic.

    A friend of mine started getting 25+ emails a day asking to be approved for registration. He didn't know what hit him, and until he sent samples to me, I didn't either. After that, I closed registration for a while and only those people who knew someone on the forum could get in.

    Kind of funny now, but not so at the time.

    Marvin
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    • Profile picture of the author inlecture
      Speaking from experience with using tools that auto join and spam forums for Backlinks one of the best ways is to use a Multi level captcha so example

      Enter the following

      1+21=
      And orange is what color?


      The two answers required even though insanely easy are not picked up by the spamming programs out that I know of and this should cut down a bit on spams.

      Captcha at the vert least is essential
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      • Profile picture of the author Havenhood
        No, I do not have Captcha and I use SMF Forum Platform.
        Simple Machines Forum?

        They have Captcha (image verification)! You may have to enable it.
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  • Profile picture of the author ArgusTargus
    I have seen a different way of doing captchas; I have seen in some sites where they ask to sum two numbers (that are shown as images). for example, add 3 and 6; and the user is supposed to provide an answer to continue.

    Good luck, and post us back your solution.
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  • Profile picture of the author keyuria
    Thanks to all warriors for their valuable feedback and possible solutions. I am ready to implement from now onwards.
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    • Profile picture of the author Blaz Banic
      I have a SMF forum and it has captcha capability. Maybe you simply have to download a mod but I'm quite sure it comes with the original. You just have to turn it on (I'm sorry, I don't remember how I did it but I know I have it).

      Go through your admin panel and figure it out (I think you even have a few different types of captchas available - from easy to very complex).

      Other than that, I use stopforumspam.com (I check every member manually but they have the capability of somehow linking to them and then spam control is automatic. I think it has something to do with API but I'm not a technical type and don't know how to set it up or what exactly it is).

      Hope this helped at least a little.

      Take care.
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      • Profile picture of the author keyuria
        Originally Posted by Blaz Banic View Post

        I have a SMF forum and it has captcha capability. Maybe you simply have to download a mod but I'm quite sure it comes with the original. You just have to turn it on (I'm sorry, I don't remember how I did it but I know I have it).

        Go through your admin panel and figure it out (I think you even have a few different types of captchas available - from easy to very complex).

        Other than that, I use stopforumspam.com (I check every member manually but they have the capability of somehow linking to them and then spam control is automatic. I think it has something to do with API but I'm not a technical type and don't know how to set it up or what exactly it is).

        Hope this helped at least a little.

        Take care.
        Sure, I will take a look into it.
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        • Profile picture of the author Phoenyx
          I created a forum this morning, I am not sure if it has captcha etc ( still learninig to work with the system), but it does notify me as soon as a post has a link and I can either let the link go through or delete it and warn the member.

          I agree with king Shiloh though. If you allow other members to be "moderators" and report posts they think of as spam, you will have a cleaner forum.

          At the end of the day, you can use all manner of systems to try root out spammers from people that actually want to be part of the community, but in the end you still have to put the time in to make sure everything runs smoothly.
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  • Profile picture of the author sitecrawler
    Banned
    I would suggest you moving to a vbulletin type a forum, because the SMF one has a major problem with the security. On vbulletin you have captcha on registration, on login if mistype 5 times your password, and most important On Threads, when starting a thread.
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  • Profile picture of the author thebitbotdotcom
    If you are using SMF, go the the registration settings in the admin panel and require confirmation. That way users will have to confirm their registration with a legit email address. Additionally, require captcha and set the difficulty to high, which really isn't that high. This should stop the spam in it's tracks cold.

    I just started a small niche forum on my blog using SMF, which is absolutely great by the way and when I did these things, it brought spam to an absolute halt. That was when I realized that no real people are signing up...none...zero...zip...nada. I know registration works because I tested it. Kinda funny really.

    But 600 signups in the first month. Guaranteed bot spam.
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  • Profile picture of the author cpadualcore
    Xrumer Effect !!!
    Implement an advanced captcha module. Make links no follow.
    I've experienced it on one of my forum too, and I solved it by adding user restrictions. Links and signatures can be allowed once they have specified no of posts. .
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  • Profile picture of the author faysal969
    Thank you keyuria very much for you great thread. I have learned so many skills from this discussion and will use this techniques for my forum.
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    • Profile picture of the author Haroon Ballim
      Hi

      You can really slow them down and very possibly eliminate these spammers by activating a free wordpress plugin called "Iron clad captcha".
      Search in your wordpress admin , for the plugin .. Simply type capcha ., than search.. It will bring up a list of captchas, .. Look for ""Iron clad Captcha'' ,and install .. You will need to register on their site to obtain an api key but its free..
      Check it out if you really want to stop the spammers . It will cost u nothing

      That is if your forum is running on wordpress.. Not quite sure if forums do

      Thanks
      Haroon
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  • Profile picture of the author Wide
    I have a forum too, with reCapcha enabled, the bots are breaking it anyway.

    99% of the spam on my forum was from automated signups (bots), so I had to do something, which is quite hard when they are able to crack the popular reCaptcha.

    I made one little change to my forum and I have not been receiving a single spam topic from that day forward, which is more than a month ago. I did this change after reading about a guy who have not received spam on his forum in more than 2 years!

    Spam bots are making topics, not replies - don't know why, but that's how it is.
    What you do is to put all new members in a special group, this group is only allowed to make replies, not topics.

    When they have made 1 reply, then move them out of this group and into the normal one - all this is done automatically.

    I then have a message on top of my forum, which is only visible to members in the first group, that says they have to make a reply to a topic before they can make a new topic.
    - Bot's can't read that, real members can

    Hope it was not too confusing :p
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  • Profile picture of the author dtommy79
    Try adding question and answer challenge to the registration page and use a question that a bot is not likely to solve.

    I also setup an initial member group where the newly registered users are. They have no permission to access the usercp so they can't add profile links and signitures. Once they have made 5 quality posts they will be moved to a new user group.

    I also added a warning to the registration agreement about this procedure and since then I don't really get any spam registrations.
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  • Profile picture of the author keyuria
    Wow, Great thoughts pouring on my thread. I really appreciate all of you for helping me out in my venture. It is indeed a great help and am implementing one by one and I can see substantial decrease in spammers joining my forum just for link building.
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