fake/spam accounts driving us insane

Yeah, I guess you're right. It's not so much a disservice to my users as it is to my moderators. They're the ones that are twisting in the wind. The moderators are staying on top of it and blasting them (we call it duck hunting) as soon as they come in, so the users don't see it for the most part. I just hate putting custom mods on a site that require hours of reconfiguring after a minor rev of the software is released. I'll suck it up in this case I guess, but I'm done with vB. As soon as XenForo goes gold, I'm switching all of my vB sites over to it.
 
I know and I'm sorry if I came across as harsh. I've been where you are at, man. It sucks. But this is exactly why there IS a modding community out there - to fill holes and to expand core functionality.
 
Walter said:
The reason for the recent flood is that a new version of the software they are using is out. The new version is able to register a user, wait for some time, and e.g. add the link to the user profile later.
(I won't post a link to give them credit)
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Walter, this is called user profile link dumping and has been going on for quite some time now, many have called it stealth spamming where you never see a post, but the spammer could have 100's or 1,000's of accounts on each forum targeted with links in the homepage and signature link slots for various idiotic clients of these Black Hat Spam-E-O morons.

This is why all new user profile (new member user group) forms should not have any homepage or signature slots available, we have discussed why forum administrators do not have the option to remove or add fields within the various user profile forms for any given custom user group.

Spam is so bad that I don't allow any new member to post without pre-moderation, they only post without moderation when moved into a Super Usergroup.

But administrators still need the option to take out the homepage link slot within user profile forms for new members.
 
I am getting spammed but not allowing them in- and it is REAL IMPORTANT to say the "home page" links are spam as well ;) Wipe the profiles!!!!
 
I found that stopforumspam only flags about 1/3 or less of the spammer that sign up.
I have solved most of mine (not on either XF or VB) in rather simple ways.

First, I disallow most IP's from trouble places....who would not be forum members anyway (india, phillipines, vietnam, etc.).
Then I have one field which must be filled out which said "location" and it gives an example like "Western PA". People who are unfamiliar with English and Geography have a tough time with that.

Lastly, I have a template which only I get to see - which lists all the new members with the newest at the top, and also has some other little links on it.....like their IP location, anything they filled in on their bio, a reporting link to stop forum spam and DELETE button.

It takes less than five minutes a day for me to find and delete 95% of the spammers. This is for a forum with 23,000 members, so I don't consider that a waste of time for a clean forum.

Nothing beats the human touch! I tried to implement a typepad spam blocker (their public free system) and immediately got user complaints from regular users. It turns out that even if their IP block is on only one of MANY blacklists, it does not let them post. There were probably 100 blacklists listed, so I doubt that just having one hit is accurate.......

I think the human question is a good one.....if you can implement it, and then....if you have less than 20 or 30 new registrants a day, checking them in one list (as I do) for the basics can weed out a few who got through.

Oh, my system also emails me when anyone either changes...or adds to their bio or url in the user profile. That means these new member with backlinks are caught within a few hours and deleted.
 
Perhaps it's no coincidence the increasing amount of spam attempts seen across forums has coincided with a massive drop in the amount of email spam worldwide. Maybe the spammers are moving into what they see as more profitable areas.

Most of my forums across a number of different platforms seem to be locked up quite tight while still allowing for new registrations. That said we seem to be seeing a lot of what appears to be human spam activity which we can't lock out unless we place new registrations in a moderation queue and even then the spammers are hard to spot.
 
While various spam prevention methods tend to work on bots there's an increasingly number of "human" spammers, mainly from the third world and those people stupid enough to believe they are going to get paid $1,000s per week to act like pork chops on online communities. We had an ongoing battle to get rid of the pricks, excuse languages, and finally discovered the full proof method. Turn off signatures and PMs for new members ;) We're still getting a huge sign up at one movie site but once they discover they can't use a sig they don't post and move onto the next target. Simple solution folks, and you get a membership number clicking over satisfactory. Make the spammers work for you!
 
Jethro, we had to be insane to start forums in the first place, then the spammers confirmed our lunacy when we kept running forums in spite of the scumbags.
 
What does this thread has anything to do with Spammer on Xenforo-based forums?
I don't know if I've seen any report about XF-based forum under attack.
 
In regards to spammers - if you build it, they will come.

Sure, this isn't really about XF spammers specifically (the board for the OP is vB), but spammers affect us all so we talk about it. An ounce of prevention and all that.
 
Andy.N said:
What does this thread has anything to do with Spammer on Xenforo-based forums?
I don't know if I've seen any report about XF-based forum under attack.
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LOL, no forum is immune to spam attacks, member Bigwater said he wanted spam protection built in to XF, but the only platform that has it is IPB where the forums on the network share data.

Myself, I think the best solution is to have a firewall with real time RBL's filtering malicious IP's before they hit the domains on the server, but you need a damn good technical admin to pull that off who wants to work everyday, I have yet to find one that does.
 
Jethro said:
While various spam prevention methods tend to work on bots there's an increasingly number of "human" spammers, mainly from the third world and those people stupid enough to believe they are going to get paid $1,000s per week to act like pork chops on online communities. We had an ongoing battle to get rid of the pricks, excuse languages, and finally discovered the full proof method. Turn off signatures and PMs for new members ;) We're still getting a huge sign up at one movie site but once they discover they can't use a sig they don't post and move onto the next target. Simple solution folks, and you get a membership number clicking over satisfactory. Make the spammers work for you!
Click to expand...
I feel your pain. With much love to my friends in India and the Philippines...

I have had to struggle with whether I should shut down my sites from view from these two countries. With vBulletin it's an increased pain because they didn't implement a good way to control spam on user profiles - not only do they post on fake profile walls but also their own. Jethro's solution works part of the way and I'll give you another unfortunate reality that I've had to deal with: URLs in posts. I have my board set at 20 before a user can post a link and shutting off editing a post after a few hours. They still come and post 20 brain dead posts, usually in a row, that I can easily spot as I have a system to scan new posts. Even turning off URLs, these automatons may come back to post domain names that don't link back to the site.

The problem is that these link services really don't care about quality. It's just about filling an order and getting that done, even if it just works for 20 minutes. Sometimes it's their own blogs, being on sites that I won't mention with hundreds if not thousands of neophytes believing that they can just throw up some site with affiliate links and make a few hundred dollars a month, if not thousands.

I'm looking forward to someone creating a good add-on for spam, perhaps one that (a) allows banning by country, (b) limiting posting URLs in all parts of the site, (c) prevents posts with a string in it, e.g. ".com" and ".net" and ".info" etc. I'm sure this will come and will certainly make XF the most efficient forum of all to use.
 
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