Human spammers

Are you using captcha images or questions? I've found that if you use questions and make them at least fairly difficult most human spammers just move on.
 
I'm pretty new to xenForo, but if ReCaptcha 2's what is used, I believe it was broken a while back. Plus captcha images are just plain annoying (for me anyway - I struggle to read most of them)
 
Questions and answers seem to work a whole lot better, and are a lot more friendly to members as well.
 
Yeah, they're joining my forum like crazy too.
It's easy to spot them because who in their right mind will signup as "gender-less" while not filling out the other important non-required user profile fields?

I deleted over 40 accounts as of now, :eek:
 
[EMAIL said:
M@rc, post: 381414, member: 3411[/EMAIL]]Yeah, they're joining my forum like crazy too.
It's easy to spot them because who in their right mind will signup as "gender-less"
I would.
#1 Because I'm crazy
or/and
#2 Because I'm genderless
or/and
#3 Because no one's business is my gender.
 
Chances are that they ARE targeting XF forums because some folks started selling lists of XF sites recently. But, that is really no different than the other lists of other forums. It's going to happen with any popular forum or cms package.

Q and A's don't stop some of them - English seems to be a 2nd language for much of the world these days.
 
You cannot get around human spammers... simple as that.

I got a barrage of them myself not long ago. They register, confirm... defeat all anti-spam measures being human and all, then they spam their profile page and leave.

Well... this is where a little admin comes into play by having Jaxels mod installed that automatically scans profile pages and comments for spam. Combine that with a simple mod available stopping anyone posting links for x posts... set it high (20, 30, 40 posts before can link) and problem solved. This is what has limited these spammers to only being able to post some minor spam on their own profile details, as the system won't let them spam profiles, posts or any thing else.

They gave up after a few days of me running the ACP anti-spam feature and removing the spam, then banning each profile. Haven't had them back since.
 
I catch many of them at the gate, a few inside. I have to check every member that comes in manually. I had to do it just as much on vB.

You can find them many different ways but you don't catch all of them each way.

Do a search of the username, do a search of the email address with the whole email address and the first part of the email address.

Do a search of the IP address.

Clues will start falling in place.

Look for things like member abc123 on one forum using the email address of abc123@something .com

Another member will be 123abc on one forum using the email address of 123abc@something.com

You will then find member abc123 using the email address of 123abc@something.com and 123abc on the same forum using abc123.

In another forum you will find abc123 and 123abc in the same thread and you know they are the same person.
 
You will find on another forum where someone has taken action. On some forum software this is helpful.

abc123 16 posts. Try to look at the posts, the information comes back no posts found.
 
Ye i have been checking them manually they usually register first then come back in few days then post siggy links . Hating these suckers . Well might give another shot at Xenutiles from Jaxel but i don't like to use mods which are very less supported by Authors themself.
 
Xenutiles is supported, and it has been excellent the entire time. Use the spam prevention in that program, and also get the minimum post count (paid) for posting links. Because it stops links everywhere, PC's, profiles, posts, etc, they cannot spam a single aspect of your site with links... thus 99.99% of the time they go elsewhere, to more susceptible sites.
 
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