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

 

[Dragonfruit]

You say there is no need but we were battling it every single day with 20+ threads, despite having a bunch of anti spam addons, trying different captchas and q&a. When I looked, we got less than a handful of legitimate users from those countries with us being strictly english based site. I've had 3 requests through email or social media asking why they can't sign up...that's in the span of 2 years doing this now. In those cases, we created the accounts for them and had them create a new password upon logging in.

I'd rather take 30 seconds to create an account, 3x in 2 years, rather than deal with multiple spammers every single day, creating sleeper accounts that don't get caught until they start spamming with them at later dates.

But hey, you do you. I've been doing this for 17+ years now. Whatever makes my life easier, I'm going to do.

And I've been doing this for 20+ years, so I'd say the experience time is fairly equal. And yet we don't have this problem. Perhaps we're doing something right that allows it to work out. But yeah, you do you, and we'll do us. I was just voicing an opinion.