XF 1.4 Spam Getting Out of Control

System0

System0

Active member
One of my forums is receiving an excessive amount of spam from automated spam software.

I am using XF 1.4.1 and have some of the TAC anti-spam add-ons installed: Tac AuthCaptha, TAC De-Dos - Reduce the effect DOS attacks usually caused by spam bots, and TAC StopCountrySpam - black/white list country IPs from registering.

I disabled the other TAC add-ons as they were stopping legitimate members from signing up. Even I couldn't sign up when I tested it with the other TAC add-ons installed.

In the user registration options area, I have Solve Media enabled. I have also tried question and answer and Google ReCaptcha. None of them works.

Currently, if I don't check the forum for a day, I go back and see dozens of spam threads. It's pushing members away and discouraging others from signing up.

I have tried a lot of different anti-spam add-ons for my discussion forums. The setup mentioned above seems to work ok with another forum of mine; but the spammers are getting through on the other forum.

What other solutions are available to me?

Kevin
 
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He's trying to prevent spam, though. Those options would aid in cleaning it up. Relevant generally to spam. They are worth checking but typically the default settings are acceptable (as they are designed to target specifically new users).
 
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It's a valid point Ingenious. I was hesitant to block India as the forum has a few legitimate members from there.

But the spam issue is out of control. So I have banned both countries for the time being. I am sure members will contact me if they cannot access the forum. At which point, I can verify they have an account and look at alternative solutions.
 
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It is a shame blocking countries if you have legitimate members from them, but sometimes it's the lesser of two evils.

Looking at the moderation of first post option suggested above, have you considered recruiting moderators to do this, but give them permissions that restrict them mostly to just this? Another suggestion to fight spam is to recruit trusted members as an "anti spam team" - put them in a usergroup that allows the spam cleaner option, so someone online will usually see and deal with it (set the spam controls to just new members though!).

What would be good is a mod that checks IPs and sticks new posts from specific countries into the mod queue.
 
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A fellow XenForo member messaged me here for advice and advised the same thing. I do think that moderation is the best route forward. I am going to ask who wants to get involved and help tackle spam.
 
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System0 said:
One of my forums is receiving an excessive amount of spam from automated spam software.

I am using XF 1.4.1 and have some of the TAC anti-spam add-ons installed: Tac AuthCaptha, TAC De-Dos - Reduce the effect DOS attacks usually caused by spam bots, and TAC StopCountrySpam - black/white list country IPs from registering.

I disabled the other TAC add-ons as they were stopping legitimate members from signing up. Even I couldn't sign up when I tested it with the other TAC add-ons installed.

In the user registration options area, I have Solve Media enabled. I have also tried question and answer and Google ReCaptcha. None of them works.

Currently, if I don't check the forum for a day, I go back and see dozens of spam threads. It's pushing members away and discouraging others from signing up.

I have tried a lot of different anti-spam add-ons for my discussion forums. The setup mentioned above seems to work ok with another forum of mine; but the spammers are getting through on the other forum.

What other solutions are available to me?

Kevin
Click to expand...

You're missing one very valuable TAC addon: StopHumanSpam. You can use this to deny posting of links and images until a user has accrued X number of posts and/or X number of likes and/or been registered for X number of days (or send such posts to the mod queue). Bammo. Spam gone. When's the last time you got spam that didn't have any links or images?

Agreed that these are human spammers most likely. The built-in honeypots of XF 1.4 stop nearly all bots IME.
 
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Ingenious said:
I take it from this then that India and Pakistan are not currently on your blacklist and if not, why not?
Click to expand...
I've been using https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.2973/ to block certain ISPs by AS Number (predominately VPS/dedicated servers) from registering, and it's quite effective even pre-1.4 with it's anti-bot measures

I've got a couple IP ranges firewalled off because it isn't even worth wasting the bandwidth attempting to let them register.
 
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kontrabass said:
You're missing one very valuable TAC addon: StopHumanSpam. You can use this to deny posting of links and images until a user has accrued X number of posts and/or X number of likes and/or been registered for X number of days (or send such posts to the mod queue). Bammo. Spam gone. When's the last time you got spam that didn't have any links or images?

Agreed that these are human spammers most likely. The built-in honeypots of XF 1.4 stop nearly all bots IME.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion. I've installed it now.

I had StopHumanSpam installed on my internet marketing due to people signing up only to self-promote. Self-promotion was never an issue on the forum experiencing spam, but you are correct that it will help tackle spammers who are adding spam manually.
 
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Good lord, didn't check my second forum for a couple of days. Welcomed by 66,000 (!!!!!) spamposts. Works excellent this build in recapatcha feature :(
 
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Bram said:
Good lord, didn't check my second forum for a couple of days. Welcomed by 66,000 (!!!!!) spamposts. Works excellent this build in recapatcha feature :(
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Do you have the "Bypass flood check" permission set to Allow by any chance? If so, don't. It should be Not Set (No). That will seriously cut down on spam. I also suggest you look at your other spam settings, if configured correctly along with the permission I mentioned you should not be getting this many spam posts in just 2 days.
 
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I've adopted the philosophy that reputation is important. If a spammer comes to my site and I don't give him hell, he'll probably come back. So when a spammer comes, I'll throw huge amounts of time at it to make sure that he doesn't make a single penny off of my site. Then, because he's probably employing humans, he'll find out that my forum just isn't cost effective.

It has worked very well for my tiny forum (only about 45 posts per day). Obviously, it might might be harder at a larger forum. But I think that there is something to be said for developing a reputation among spammers for being a "hard target," not a "soft" one.
 
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THanks @Martok as I recently started this second forum I forgot to setup my human verification questions and just used default google recaptcha which obviously is pure crap, so why is it still used as a protection feature in XF?

I am now stuck with 69,000 spamposts and see no other option than manually deleting all the posts and start all over again.

And this only because I forgot the simple one line question, will never happen again ;D
 
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I have never really had a problem with spam, granted my forum is small. For all of the methods that I have test, question and answer seems in conjunction with StopForumSpam to be the best way to stop them registering and posting, much better then the image captcha.
 
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Mike said:
While I can't speak for the spam you're getting, I wouldn't be definitive about that. The only spam we get here appears to be backed by humans in some way. You can actually see how they end up at our site (URL opener sites, referrers from elsewhere, coming back to a previous profile they registered). The majority of the IPs are from India or Pakistan (or from VPN-type services). The format of the spam is similar to what you're reporting.

The majority of stuff we do to prevent spam is down to picking up the keywords that they use that our regular users don't use (things like "garcinia", "muscle", etc).
Click to expand...
That's the type my forums being hit by, mostly from India with the spam being about weight lose and muscle building, seems to happen between 5-6am UK time every day.
 
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