XF 2.0 I'm fed up with spammers posting 500 posts a day on xenForo

Marco Famà

Marco Famà

Active member
hi guys,

I literally had to close the board a few moments ago cause I can't keep up with using Tapatalk or the ACP to moderate and kill all this ****e threads

for the sake of clarity, this is my Spam Management page and how I've set it up (which, if I'm not mistaken, should be robust enough to kill):

Time-Lapse-Network-Forum-xenforo-anti-spam-options.jpg



yes, I am getting so much that is not a nice experience anymore to run my forum, as spam banning is now the work I have to do instead of replying to users.

My questions are:
1) am I doing anything deep wrong with the above settings?
2) any premium low cost solution as Akismet on WordPress or let xenForo clean up the current system (over 1000 spam threads to be killed, can you imagine??)?
3) any way I can clean it up on the database table (xf_forum) and how to do it safely with no risk?

thank you All / @Brogan
 
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The trick with "Use question & answer CAPTCHA" is to use a question which is specific for your niche.

Q: In photography the little button you press to take a picture is called _____ (hint starts with S)
A: shutter
 
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mr Lucky - well yes they are, shouldn't they and be broader? like "Who is the President of the USA now?"

Andy nice input, I could try again...


and how to clean up the **** they left? maybe via DB?
 
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27751161147_1827d64fc0_o.png

You should increase those one, read the caption.
Additionally, you really should now swap out all of your api keys after you've posted them publicly. That should help you cleaning up. Regarding the spam problem - did you check if they manually register?
 
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Thomas, what are the suggested value of the 3 criterias you screenshot?

to be honest - might be cause I'm not ENG mothertongue - but I find the caption awkward / not easy to understand...
 
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AndyB said:
The trick with "Use question & answer CAPTCHA" is to use a question which is specific for your niche.

Q: In photography the little button you press to take a picture is called _____ (hint starts with S)
A: shutter
Click to expand...

Good one. How about:

What is the round glass bit called at the front of the camera?
What did people used to have to buy a roll of in the old days?

I have added a couple of extra fields to registration. Nothing clever just my own Q & A (e.g. Are you a spammer? Have you been banned from this site?)

Not very clever, but I wonder if merely by customising the form it can help put off anything that is automated and programmed re: the default xenforo registration.
 
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hey Optic,
it's really time consuming as I have to do for 999+ messages.

those *******s(not sure how) have made it even worse. Once I could ban 1 and get maybe 100 removed bulk. Now XF is powerless, all different authors and messages

they kill my forum basically (and don't know why!)

@S Thomas any ideas on those 3 values?

Mr Lucky - thanks a lot! :)
 
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Have you analyzed where the spam is coming from? What country, what hosts? Still on 1.5.x here using https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.2973/ and since we have no legitimate Pakistani or Indian traffic blocking the one ISP in each country that accounted for 99% of the spam stopped it. Pretty much all the China/Russia traffic is handled by the stock honeypots.

We also block all data center traffic from registration. The only people that affects is VPN users. So tread lightly. It doesn't stop them from using our site. They just can't use one to register. You can tune it however you want though. All VPN/Data Center traffic to moderation.

I am lucky to see one spammer a month and maybe 2 legit users get moderated. 0 Captcha's of any kind (although I haven't checked in awhile we might have turned on the new recaptcha for giggles.
 
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JustinHawk said:
1. its better not to use taptalk, dont know if they are targeting your site via this.
Click to expand...
Marco Famà said:
I literally had to close the board a few moments ago cause I can't keep up with using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Ah good call re: Tapatalk @JustinHawk

@Marco Famà if you're using Tapatalk then new member registrations via their app are going to completely bypass the XenForo SPAM protection options you've set. I would maybe experiment by temporarily removing Tapatalk to see if there's any improvement. You'll probably need to follow up with Tapatalk about what SPAM protection measures they've implemented.
 
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