Spam from users

[tanis8472]

Hi guys,

You should check your users as you have a lot of spam registrations and I'm also receiving spam PM's.

You have 16384 users of which many a spam.

[Paul]

We clean out spam daily and if you receive PMs with spam, please flag them and we'll clean them out too. Spam registrations on their own are unavoidable and we can only act once a spam message is posted or a spam PM is sent.

[seeker]

Dennis - actually spam registrations are avoidable. Is this a phpbb board or something else? There are very simple hacks/addons to most of the boards for registration (like adding a question "enter the letters of our product - M E Z - come on you can do it" - i.e. something a robot can't do). I administer a lot of social forums about infertility and writing. We had TONS of "youluvmeandiwillregister" entries. but with a very simple hack/addon, we cut down on spam registrations by 99%. Yes. I had to clear out tons of older registrations, but we now get almost NO robot registrations anymore. Send me email, or check your forum "forum"...

[Paul]

This is vBulletin. We are using a captcha image, but I've just changed it to a couple of manual question/answers - let's see if that cuts down on spam registrations.

I would still argue that you can't cut spam a 100%, since there are actually manual registrations that will be coming through any spam filters, but if we can reduce it significantly, then it's all good :)

[seeker]

hee hee - I never said 100, I said 99... nyah nyah. Good change. captcha is almost worthless. We get manual registrations and then spam. but it has been about 1%. Or maybe 2. I forget.

[Paul]

Thanks for the heads up in any case ;) Now I just hope my questions are not too complex :)

[seeker]

you still have to go and delete the 5000 spam registrants by hand. oh my is THAT a pain. some are obvious, and some you just have to sigh and say ... ok i'll leave bigass alone, but i'm definitely deleting russiangirlsneedlove

[Paul]

We'll knock them off as they wake up... What would you do with "bigassrussiangirlsneedlove" though? :)

[seeker]

Now THAT is a tough question.