XF 1.4 Inundated by Spammers - Any suggestions?

[nassella]

Every day we are getting hit hard by spammers. The spam catcher rarely catches them. Another 20 or 30% are getting into the moderation queue. The rest are getting registered. I think I probably find and remove 5-10 a day on a pretty small forum.


They are coming from India, Pakistan, the Netherlands and god knows where else.

I'm banning them as soon as I can get to them and removing their threads. I am banning every IP address they are associated with. I thought their activity would lessen over time but it doesn't appear to be.

http://www.cortjohnson.org/forums/

Suggestions are welcome.

 

[nassella]

Does banning IP addresses do anything at all?

To repeat the spam catcher is not catching any of this really - I can tell 80% of the time who the spammers simply by the weird spelling of the names.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Human or bots?

What kind of captcha?

I added a required user field that just said "tick this box" (required) which seemed to help with bots.

Then your second line of defence is to make sure all new registrations (i.e. permissions for registered) require moderation.

Then have a user promotion to add a secondary group (permissions allowing to bypass moderation) that requires 1 or more approved posts. At least that way no spam shows up on your forum.

 

[nassella]

I don't think we have a captcha!

Thanks for the other ideas....

I don't know if they are humans or bots. Some leave a single link - usually to a livestream athletic event and some leave weird non-grammatical English that kind of makes sense and adds a link .

 

[Mouth]

Anti-spam Improvements

 

[TPerry]

To repeat the spam catcher is not catching any of this really - I can tell 80% of the time who the spammers simply by the weird spelling of the names.

And the majority of them are going to be actual human spammers - which are even harder for the automated systems to catch.
About all you can really do is place them in a "moderated" user group (the registered one) and then after they have made a set amount of posts have a promotion run to promote them to "Members".