Prevent new users from posting links

[PumpinIron]

One of the biggest frustrations I have is with people signing up for the forum to try and spam post with links.

They're getting smarter as well. They manage to bypass all the spam filters during the registration process and they use U.S. based (non VPN) IPs as well. There is absolutely nothing that gives way that they are spammers other than the fact that they will respond to threads (usually with helpful, non AI, well thought out responses) but what they do is reply to a thread using the quote function.

Within that quote they will slip in a spam link. This goes undetected by myself and everyone else. Had it not been for the watchful eye of a veteran forum member I wouldn't have ever caught onto it.

So then this begs the question; why is there not some sort of third party solution to prevent new users (or ideally users with less than X posts) from posting links?

The built-in spam protection in XF works great for blocking spam registrations, but it's clear that there are some spammers that can easily get around that.

Thoughts?

 

[smallwheels]

Within that quote they will slip in a spam link. This goes undetected by myself and everyone else. Had it not been for the watchful eye of a veteran forum member I wouldn't have ever caught onto it.

So then this begs the question; why is there not some sort of third party solution to prevent new users (or ideally users with less than X posts) from posting links?

If in this quote was already a link and they changed it within their quote (which is what happened once in my forum years ago with a spammer) a new user also could not quote that content. And if he could he could obviously still edit the link.

I get where you are coming from but the probably more common solution is to have the first couple of posts of a user go through moderation. You just have to set the permission "Submit content without approval" for new users (respectively their user group) and auto promote them after maybe five posts. It is a bit annoying as you have to watch the moderation queue frequently and posts of new users will be delayed before being published, but it is a workaround in case there is no add on that does what you want.

The built-in spam protection in XF works great for blocking spam registrations

I do have my doubts, given the relatively frequent spam postings of new users on this forum here (that then get manually removed).

 

[ES Dev Team]

I'm seeing tons of them get around all the stock protection.

I've considered using cleantalk, but i'm not sure how effective that is.

 

[Dragonfruit]

So then this begs the question; why is there not some sort of third party solution to prevent new users (or ideally users with less than X posts) from posting links?

There just isn't an updated one, this still works on 2.2 to my knowledge. Unsure for 2.3:

P

[XenMax] - Limit Post Link

Dec 20, 2017

This addon prevent certain usergroups from posting links until they reach a certain number of posts.

• Paul R
• xenmax
• Add-ons [2.x]

 

[Anthony Parsons]

They manage to bypass all the spam filters during the registration process and they use U.S. based

Nope. Go to Options > Spam Management > Spam phrases.

/(?i)(?:https?:\/\/\S+|www\.\S+|[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,}|\b(?:[A-Za-z0-9-]+\.)+[A-Za-z]{2,}\b)
www
http

Set it to manually approve.

Just above that setting is, Maximum Messages to Check for Spam. Set it to something like 20, that it pushes beyond the lazy spammer or automated one.

Automated is easy to deal with via CF WAF. Grab your log file, record the IP's of spam posts somewhere, give claude or chatgpt access to your downloaded log file, give them the known IP's of various spam posts, ask it to find the pattern to write a CF rule to stop POST. You can then stack OR statements into one WAF expression, stopping automated spam filling your moderation queue.