Spam Bot Finder Addons / Plugins for Xenforo ? Third Party Options ?

Digital Doctor

Well-known member
Native Xenforo Addons
(1) XenUtiles old thread: XenUtiles (by Jaxel)
Supports:
  • StopForumSpam
  • Fspamlist
  • Botscout
- Protects Profile Posts as well.
- Testimony

Check out my mod XenUtiles... it has stop forum spam and a "spam bot finder". The spam bot finder works by searching for URLs in people's profiles. If it finds them, it lists the user in the list, with their relevant information. From there you can decide if they are a bot or not and delete them.

(2) BotScout (by Fred Sherman)
- doesn't rely on reCAPTCHA.
- Supports: Botscout only

(3) [splendidpoint.com] AntiSPAM - Prevent Links and Emails
- allows you to prevent certain usergroups from posting links and email addresses until they reach a certain number of posts set by you.

(4) Stop Spam here (sonnb) $10 USD.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/sonnb-stop-spam-here-paid.33479/

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Third Party Addons:
(1) Botscout - http://www.botscout.com/
- Botscout has an API that you can use on your signup form to keep Xrumer scum from registering to your forums in the first place. (AnthonyCea)
(2) Bad behavior (Alfa1)
(3) project honeypot (Alfa1)

Xenforo Admin Suggestions:
(1) Question and Answer CAPTCHA - added January 13, 2011 (beta6) - see notes
(2) Ban Quick Email providers
(3) Watch for international registrants, when your forum isn't international in nature (tip).
(4) Use Cloudflare's Tools. (mrGTB)
(5) Moderate the posts of New Users (Jake)
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Quick and Dirty tips from elsewhere:

(1) Jigsaw: XenUtiles + change to a Q&A captcha
I recommend anyone having this issue to install XenUtiles and change to a Q&A captcha. It has been said 10+ times in the prior posts, but I just want to add my 2 cents. This really does work and I have had 0 spammers make it through registration from the time I switched to XenUtiles and Q&A (about 24 hours).

(2) Melbo's Stop Spam Herre (sonnb) + English Q&A.
I'm using this http://xenforo.com/community/resources/sonnb-stop-spam-here.845/ and haven't had a single spam registration since. You need to register for a Stop Forum Spam key and an Askimet key.

What kind of Q&A are you using? Mine are super easy if you are a human who speaks English (my audience) but difficult if you aren't.

(3) Moderate the posts of New Users (Jake)



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Please reply here with suggestions, addons, third party addons, articles about being a good admin, etc. Provide Links to other suggestions.
Let's help each other on this one !
 
Unless you have a www.botscout.com add on you are missing the boat.

PS: You have to 'add it on yourself' if there is no official mod, I'm sure a competent technical admin can handle it or add the API to a software firewall.
 
Bad behavior & project honeypot.
And off course stopforumspam

Dont know if these are available for XF yet, but they should.
 
New in xenforo beta6:

Question and Answer CAPTCHA
question-list-png.9105

Adding to the armoury of tools in the war against spam, XenForo now supports a question-and-answer CAPTCHA system, allowing you to define a number of questions that pose no problems for humans to answer, but require significant effort for robots to decipher and respond.

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-1-0-0-beta-6-released.10377/#post-141118

Any reports on this method of Spam Prevention ?
 
There is this third party MOD that you can license each month to stop ALL forms of ROBOT and USER SPAM and its by far the BEST money can pay for. Google even went on record to say "It's the best we've ever seen!" and CNN called it "The wave of the future" and XenFrench.com even said "Il est le meilleur jamais!"

what is it called and where can you get it??? Glad you asked

Its called "Andrew" and you can get it right here

:)
 
You guys missed the boat on my new spam prevention idea, it is called 'who is this celebrity' then it flashes photos of stars so the member can choose via images.
 

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Andrew, my Supermodel CAPTCHA mod also increases participation in the forums by the demographic all webmasters want, young males, even old one's who do not have their wives following them around the web will flock to your forums too !

Hell Charlie Sheen might even join your forum if you use it.
 
Great admin tip:


Just a note on sites with a lot of members - I'm sure more than a few of them have a lot of really active genuine members, but in my experience - I run a vB forum which has been operating for nearly 9 years and is very location specific (ie the forum is very specific to Australia).

Because of the popularity of the forums and the good search engine rankings we get, we've always been a target for spam. When trying to deal with this, I decided to try tracking the geo-location of IP addresses of registering members (using the Maxmind database). I was astounded to see so many people registering from countries outside of Australia (in particular China, India, Philippines, Malaysia, etc). I also ask people for their location when registering (mandatory user profile field), and discovered that almost all of these users were lying about their location. Further analysis of existing users showed that they were also the people posting all the spam.

So now, I have an automated system to check all new registrations and anyone from a country on my "blacklist" gets placed into moderation so I can decide quickly whether to allow them in or just delete them. This has already made major progress with spam.

The thing that surprised me was just how many of these registrations we were getting each day - we get 10-15 new registrations a day, and nearly half of them are from people outside of Australia - almost all of whom lie about their location when they register.

Looking back at the users in the database, we have a LOT of members who were not legitimate users and only signed up to spam the forums.

Naturally, this approach does not work quite as well with a more international forum - one of my other sites is almost as busy and has a very international focus, with quite a few legitimate members from those regions where spammers tend to come from. As such, I've needed to take a slightly different approach and don't auto-moderate such users. Fortunately, spam is less of a problem on that site - possibly due to the nature of the content.
 
=== CloudFlare ===

Since I started using CloudFlare most spam threats are now getting blocked by it, not one spammer has been seen getting in since. :)

cloudflare-png.22140


Funny also to see most threats have been blocked from the UK. :whistle:

cloudflare_uk-png.22141


My forum has also been suffering from no more slow page loading times, which was daily lasting hours at times. Nor have I had any downtime since using it 3 days ago. Forums running 100 times better.

[source]
 
This is why I really love http://xenforo.com/community/resources/splendidpoint-com-antispam-prevent-links-and-emails.106/ which just stops all this. I jack it up to a decent number... screw new members wanting to post links. Spammers don't even bother, they just go hit the next site. They can't post anywhere with that mod. I also remove the URL field from profiles... another deterrent.

I only have around 30 new registrations daily... very rarely do we get spam with Jaxel Utiles mod, the above linked mod and auto remove zero poster accounts mod. Barely see spammers nowadays.

Great advice !
 
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