Suggestion regarding vs spam bots.

[IcEWoLF]

Hi Scott,
My suggestion against spam bots that sign up on the website and post stuff on the forums could probably be easily be prevented by just having validation code when they try to sign up/log in on the website.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

There is one when they sign up.

We have a bot which cleans spam automatically but it has been turned off the past few weeks as it was tagging to many legit messages as spam which causes the poster of the message to get upset and try posting the same message a few times and finally getting upset at us for censoring them, when in reality their message goes into a queue for the staff to approve them.

 

[vurbano]

Ban the IP numbers as you find them?

 

[goober]

There is one when they sign up.

We have a bot which cleans spam automatically but it has been turned off the past few weeks as it was tagging to many legit messages as spam which causes the poster of the message to get upset and try posting the same message a few times and finally getting upset at us for censoring them, when in reality their message goes into a queue for the staff to approve them.

How do they get around the Validation code?

 

[goober]

You could ask a qustion witha simple answer.. (ex 2 + 2 =)

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

How do they get around the Validation code?

They enter it.

There is a site (actually a few of them) which show pictures of naked women, but to see the lady you must enter the code on the screen. The code is a validation code for sites like ours.

The new version of vBulletin which I have been playing around with for about a week now has some nice spam control and validation stuff built in.

BTW you can't ban IP addresses as then you would be locking out legit users as well on some of the IP's (especially coming from AOL, Starband etc.)

One of the things we have seen as of late the the spammers are using other peoples accounts which are older then 30 days. It seems as though a lot of folks use the same password on all the forums they belong to, and eaither a site was hacked or more likely they joined a site which is just harvesting usernames and passwords.

Spam is big business, I still have yet to figure out who buy the crap they sell, but obiously someone does.

 

[IcEWoLF]

There is one when they sign up.

Ah been so long that I signed up, I didn't remember.

 

[stevenl]

I beleive it comes with the VB 3.7 or you can get it as an add-on its a "Human Verification" add-on its pretty neat it has a new highly advanced captcha system, or you can do questions,

 

[spiegelj07]

how about a Validation code to post mesages

 

[Van]

how about a Validation code to post mesages

People are lazy plus that would become iritating after a while for everyone.

Scott it would be an idea to require a password change every 90 days or so like my company and a past one does, it cuts down on account sharring and security issues. You could go the route that hotmal has and really make it difficult to even get an account back, I've been fighting with them for three months to try and get an email account back and they wont budge even though I've shown them that its the parental acount for another account and that it has only been accessed from the same IP address for the last year.

 

[mike123abc]

password changes every 90 days would not really do much but irritate people too. Spammers are usually register and spam until banned.

A validation code for the first 10 messages would be limited help, but they get around validation codes by having people type them in for porn access. They want the code for satelliteguys.us so they show the code to someone on their porn site for porn access they type it in and viola it is entered here.

 

[Anole]

I moderate on a far less busy vB forum.
We instituted the auto-suspend feature on early posts by users, who used any of a short list of key words.
Once in a while we get a double-post by someone who didn't read the message that their post would be dealt with at a later time.
People don't read.

Nothing with sex-related, drug-related, sale-related, or link-related comments gets through.
And if something does, we just add it to the key word list.
Beats the hell out of turning off that feature!

I'm sure SatGuy's has thousands of post per day, but that's what Moderators are for.

edit: oh, and after two hits from an IP, it -does- get banned!
You'd be surprised how that cuts down on repeat offenders!