Hundreds of Spam Bots on Website!!! Help??

[Aero_4D]

As you can obviously tell by my website that was bombed by bots, before we even started getting real people online:

http://earthreborn.us/forum/
http://earthreborn.us/forum/
I have a small problem.... I need a way to delete ALL users, AND remove all the spam in the chat..... I have tried through XenForo, but it would literally take 100's of hours to delete them all one by one... Someone told me there is a way for me to delete them all instantly through cPanel. Can anyone help me!!

PS> How can I also install CAPTCHA so that this doesn't happen again?!

 

[RobParker]

You can run an SQL query from within phpmyadmin if you have access to that. I suspect Jake will be along to help with that.

The captcha options are in the admin control panel. I found the Q&A option with some good questions to be the best way to do it.

 

[Aero_4D]

You can run an SQL query from within phpmyadmin if you have access to that. I suspect Jake will be along to help with that.

The captcha options are in the admin control panel. I found the Q&A option with some good questions to be the best way to do it.

Alright, Captcha is installed, I'm in PHPMyAdmin.... How do I run the query?

 

[Chris D]

This guide by Jake contains lots of tips.

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-forum-spam.980/

Start from the beginning see how you get on.

Spam Cleaner is the preferred clean up method, but there are some manual methods too, including some SQL queries.

 

[Aero_4D]

This guide by Jake contains lots of tips.

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-forum-spam.980/

Start from the beginning see how you get on.

Spam Cleaner is the preferred clean up method, but there are some manual methods too, including some SQL queries.

Buy how can I simply delete ALL users from PHPMyAdmin?

 

[Chris D]

Have the users posted?

If they have posted you will want to remove their posts first using the queries in the guide by Jake.

Banning or deleting a user does not remove their posts so you will want to tidy that up first.

 

[Aero_4D]

Have the users posted?

If they have posted you will want to remove their posts first using the queries in the guide by Jake.

Banning or deleting a user does not remove their posts so you will want to tidy that up first.

No, but after I delete their posts they keep posting. They're bots, so I need to delete them all first.

 

[surfsup]

Close the forum first

 

[Chris D]

Yeah or close the forum first.

On the guide I posted is a link to this thread which is a query which bans all users who registered between two dates:

http://xenforo.com/community/thread...d-accounts-by-certain-date.35697/#post-405829

 

[erich37]

I have also been attacked by spammers.
Although I did not start my Forum yet, there are a couple thousand spam-posts on it now and about 200 spam-accounts. No "real" members have registered yet on my Forum.

How do I mass-delete all members via ACP ?
Do I have to do this "one-by-one" ?

I do not see any option in ACP to check a box in order to select all members and delete ALL of those members via just one click?

Is there any way to do this without going into the database?


Additionally, I would like to mass-ban the IP-addresses of ALL members at my Forum.


Appreciate your help!

 

[Jake Bunce]

Basically everything is here:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-forum-spam.980/

There is currently no mass prune feature for users. But the above guide does link a couple of options for users:

4) This person wanted to mass delete all users in the moderation queue, but there is no option to mass select the delete option on that page. I posted a template edit here to change the default selections:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/how-to-mass-delete-users-awaiting-approval.35568/#post-404156

This is useful if you want to delete all users in the moderation queue and there are a lot of them.

5) Here is a query to mass ban all users who registered between two dates:

http://xenforo.com/community/thread...d-accounts-by-certain-date.35697/#post-405829

 

[erich37]

there are spammers who have literally hundreds of different IP-addresses per one single user-account.

Does it make sense to "ban" and "discourage" all those IP-addresses? Since it seems those are not the real IP-addresses of the spammer since I understand the spammers are coming via a Proxy and using fake IP-addresses ?

there needs to be a tool in ACP to mass "ban" and mass "discourage" IP-addresses when one member is using hundreds of different IP-addresses.

 

[Jake Bunce]

IP banning is not effective in cases like this. It's better to implement Q&A or a spam database or third party captcha:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-forum-spam.980/

 

[Brandon Sheley]

Buy how can I simply delete ALL users from PHPMyAdmin?

I just had to do this last night and all I did was sort by highest userID, then check mark the users I wanted to drop.
If they’ve made new threads or post, you’ll do the same on your post and thread table, luckily all the users and post on my site looked exactly the same so it was easy to spot the spam.

Good luck

 

[erich37]

so I need to "manually" delete all spam-users ?

 

[Corwin]

Try this Captcha. There is out of the box support for XenForo.
https://www.keycaptcha.com/captcha-for-cms/

I were using ReCaptcha but spam-bots were coming. When I switched to KeyCaptcha no new spam bots.

 

[erich37]

the interesting thing is this:

at my XF-Forums which are "Branding Free", there is literally no spam at all!
So it seems the spammers are targeting XenForo-powered Forums specifically.

 

[Jake Bunce]

I just had to do this last night and all I did was sort by highest userID, then check mark the users I wanted to drop.
If they’ve made new threads or post, you’ll do the same on your post and thread table, luckily all the users and post on my site looked exactly the same so it was easy to spot the spam.

Good luck

That works, but it leaves behind many joined records so it's not a very "clean" solution.

 

[tenants]

the interesting thing is this:

at my XF-Forums which are "Branding Free", there is literally no spam at all!
So it seems the spammers are targeting XenForo-powered Forums specifically.

They just about always target forums from search or direct lists

With Xrumer, see here:
http://ixrumer.com/general/36-xrumer-7528-elite.html

XenForo (footprint "Forum software by XenForo")

Google search: "Forum software by XenForo"

It use to be even easier to target forums when they use to show the version numbers in the footer (but it was eventually realised, the version number was also being used for security exploits, hence we rarely now see forums with forum versions exposed publicly)

I went for the brand free version for this very reason, to hold off the spam attacks until I had designed something to prevent them

 

[Brandon Sheley]

That works, but it leaves behind many joined records so it's not a very "clean" solution.

ya but I sure wasn't going to manually delete 1,000 users (mass moderation on xf isn't the best)
I tried to remove all records that I could find.