Managing Spam with XenForo 2.3

turtile

Well-known member
It's been many years since I've had forums active. I am considering opening one up again. However, the main reason I shut them down in the first place was the large amount of spam. I used plugins and the built-in features but the cleanup became too much (up to 90 hours a week running a business). About 99% of the web traffic was from these spammers/crawlers.

Are there improvements in spam prevention with 2.3? Does Xon's plugin cut down on spam significantly? Is Cloudflare a must-have? Is the free version good enough?

I appreciate your help!
 
For my site, I don't get much spam breaking through, even when they try really hard, as the automated tools take care of it. I can't see you having to spend a large amount of your time dealing with it. I think you just need to try it and see.
 
It's been many years since I've had forums active. I am considering opening one up again. However, the main reason I shut them down in the first place was the large amount of spam. I used plugins and the built-in features but the cleanup became too much (up to 90 hours a week running a business). About 99% of the web traffic was from these spammers/crawlers.

Are there improvements in spam prevention with 2.3? Does Xon's plugin cut down on spam significantly? Is Cloudflare a must-have? Is the free version good enough?

I appreciate your help!
I get little. The tools do the job.
 
No spam, have a question that requires a zip code using regular expressions. Stops spam in its tracks because the explanation is text based and not by example. If I displayed an example, bots could easily pick up on that.
 
For my site, I don't get much spam breaking through, even when they try really hard, as the automated tools take care of it. I can't see you having to spend a large amount of your time dealing with it. I think you just need to try it and see.

No spam, have a question that requires a zip code using regular expressions. Stops spam in its tracks because the explanation is text based and not by example. If I displayed an example, bots could easily pick up on that.

Only by the use of the built-in Xenforo tools?

So basically, I need to find questions that are very easy for the public but not for bots.
 
Only by the use of the built-in Xenforo tools?
Yup, nothing more than what's offered by XF itself. Note that I've made the settings a bit stricter than what the defaults were, but that's it. I was quite prepared to use an add-on for this, even a paid one, but I've just not needed to. Note that everyone's situation is different though, so there's still a place for these add-ons.
 
Spammers usually post in a forum so their links are picked up and indexed by Google and Bing bots, to increase their search ranking. XF has a field where you can enter a regular expression to weed out posts which have URLs in them. As spammers are usually hit and run, you can set a threshold to check the first X number of posts for URLs, and send the posts to moderation where you can choose to approve them or clean the account as a spammer.

There are other spam features built in that help, including scoring with the StopForumSpam database. However...


I purchased this. It stops spam bot registrations, and it has halted all but the manual ("human") spam signups, which are very few and far between. With that and checking initial posts for URLs, we can pretty much weed out spam before anyone in the forums see it.
 
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