XF 2.1 Massive spam issue

PJK

Active member
Last Friday I randomly had 6,000 new registrations who posted a lot. One of the mods manually went through and spam cleaned as much as possible, it took hours. I then required manual approval for all new registrations. Today, I got 50+ email notifcations from users spamming via PM, which were accounts created on Friday. And today, hundreds more registered and are under approval. I disabled registration and also updated the registration question on Friday.

What's the best/fastest way to clean up these PM/registration/post spam of hundreds of people and how can I prevent them going forward? I've used XF for years and never had this issue until now.

Thanks.
 
I'd recommend a CATCHA instead of Questions: Once a spammer knows at least 1 question/answer combination they can automatically spam (just reload until the known question appears).
 
Which CATCHA you recommend? the default google CATCHA was blocked in China

You could try if hCaptcha runs in China (I assume it does).


.. but you need XF 2.2 in order to have it out of the box.
 
You could try if hCaptcha runs in China (I assume it does).


.. but you need XF 2.2 in order to have it out of the box.

i am pretty sure CloudFlare is working in China, so i think hcaptcha is working in China. thank you so much, i'll try it
 

do they block recaptcha.net domain as well? there was a discussion on this in another thread few days ago. not sure if xenforo uses this domain over google's.

not sure, but recaptcha is not working for me on many sites here in China. i think they just block the whole google family
 
from the looks of it, this should be fixed in next update.


xenforo is switching to recaptcha.net domain. assuming you are in china, you can just try loading this domain to see if this works?
 
from the looks of it, this should be fixed in next update.


xenforo is switching to recaptcha.net domain. assuming you are in china, you can just try loading this domain to see if this works?

we usually don't use Google product here in China if it has alternatives, because you don't know when they gonna block it again, but anyway thank you
 
Only enable 1.

If you enable 5 at a time, you will never know which one has been compromised by xrumer, so you have to ditch them all.


The spam cleaner is the best tool for the job.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. Spam cleaner works great usually, but with these attacks, it is labor intensive, took about 5 hours to spam clean all the accounts last time. Is there anyway to do it more automated? We're having a lot of issues here. Thanks.

I will be setting this up soon too:
 
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