XF 1.1 My Forum's Getting Lots Of Spam

[System0]

edit by jake - I just posted a resource that consolidates all of the information from this thread into one guide:
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-forum-spam.980/

I've never had any problems with spam before but when I checked my forum today I saw lots of spam threads. Some were in Russian though many were in English.

I checked some users and they had fully validated their account using Gmail. The spam is undoubtedly automated though.

Some users have signed up using the domain andasio.com.

At the moment I am getting a new thread every few minutes and the IP addresses are all different so there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it

(note: I haven't installed any new add ons or mods in a while so I don't think that's the issue)

I used to have this problem with vBulletin though this is the first time I've ever had a problem with XenForo. It's kind of taken me by surprise to be honest.

Any idea how this is happening and how I can stop it?

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[ManagerJosh]

anyone seeing the number of failed registration attempts slowing down ?

 

[MichaelDance]

anyone seeing the number of failed registration attempts slowing down ?

I installed that [8wayRun.Com] XenUtiles (Tools) and the spam stopped lol

 

[wickedstangs]

I installed that [8wayRun.Com] XenUtiles (Tools) and the spam stopped lol

me too and it stopped.. sweet..

 

[MattW]

anyone seeing the number of failed registration attempts slowing down ?

I've not had any attempts in the last 2 hours (it's been constant previously)

 

[Juze]

I haven't had any problems on my XenForo. Maybe it's not too popular yet (1,25k posts and 65 members + daily ~10 lurkers). I've been using StopForumSpam all the time though.

EDIT: I've had random 4 spambots months ago before I installed StopForumSpam. Also, I'm not using CloudFlare at the moment.

 

[MattW]

I've not had any attempts in the last 2 hours (it's been constant previously)

And they are back

 

[MichaelDance]

And they are back

are most of yours from Ukraine?

 

[Andy.N]

As long as they are not getting in and create massive amount of spam posts, we shouldn't just sit around and look at the logs
It's just like checking your server access/error logs, only good in moderation

 

[TNCclubman]

man thought it was just me. the past week its kicked up for the first time. have the Q&A and its not stopping them

 

[MichaelDance]

man thought it was just me. the past week its kicked up for the first time. have the Q&A and its not stopping them

use the XenUnique thingi It does the job for now mate.

 

[Edrondol]

Since I put XenUtils on a little less than 24 hours ago, it has stopped 251 spam users from registering.

 

[MagnusB]

Considering savagerebirth.com is on there I think it is safe to assume they go a lot of their list from the website showcase forum. savagerebirth has barely been linked from any other sites as we aren't ready and has very few posts.

My site is on there, and that is not linked on this site, except for a few PC's, and I very much doubt any of those are affiliated with XRumer.

 

[Jamie Edwards]

Just wanted to chime in and say that over on Kayako forums - http://forums.kayako.com - we've gone rom about 4-6 spams per day to over 100. We've used reCAPTCHA, but I just switched to Q&A to see if that works.

Given that these bots register a few days beforehand we won't see the effects immediately.

I'd love to see Xenforo host a simple community spam service, where spam reports are submitted to a central server, and Xenforo installations can be configured to check that for spam-banned IPs at registrations (based on a threshold of reports, of course).

Not holding my breath, but this seems to have stemmed most of the issue.

Ok, we're back to normal levels of spam since adding some questions (like 'What is the sixth letter in the word Kayako?')

 

[Walter]

Attention XenUtils / SFS users:

http://xenforo.com/community/thread...e-removal-of-xen-utilities-users.35421/unread

 

[ManagerJosh]

and get the updated XenUtils:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/8wayrun-com-xenutiles-tools.104/updates

 

[Adam Howard]

FIXED

 

[swatme]

i observe that saturday and sunday are the ones where spammers registered massively in my site.
because by monday i was able to stop them.

Now i want to ban all accounts registered within those date saturday and sunday.
How to do that ?

 

[kprojects]

My new Q&A question:
How many legs total: 2 humans a dog and 2 cats?
Answer:
...
...


...
...
16
sixteen

 

[MikeMpls]

okay..spoke too soon.. they all came back online.

Probably just went out to Макдоналдс for a bite to eat. Spammers are people, too, sort of.

I re-enabled registrations in my most active XenForo site around 3 a.m. 19 hours later XenUtiles has blocked > 400 registration attempts. And those are just the ones that are allowed to try. I have no idea how many have been been blocked by the country blocker (blocking China, India, Russia, Ukraine & assorted other places & anonymous proxies); it doesn't keep any stats.

 

[Abracadaniel]

Something strange is going on. I have Q&A turned on, and for experimental purposes we set our only Q&A question to something that can't be answered (like 79876532, or so). There still some new registrations.
How do they skip Q&A section?