Recent Spam Bomb on my site....

[Chris_H]

Afternoon everyone,

Friday and Saturday my site was the victim of a major spam bomb, (20,000 ish pharmacy related posts) they used up gigs of bandwidth and now there are 100+ guests on my site all attempting to browse threads that have been deleted. I am sure they are spam related bots but I am not sure what is the best method to deter/ban them as they are only guests. Any advice would be appreciated, I am rather new to running a forum and my subject (next generation of a popular car) has not been announced yet.

 

[Ridemonkey]

You could use this add-on to reduce the number of bots/scrapers that are trying to get at your site:
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/dedos-anti-dos-for-spam-bot-scrapers.3305/

It will detect users who have looked at X number of pages within Y seconds, both parameters are configurable, and block their IP for a period that you set.

I'm using it on my site with it set pretty conservatively - basically only trying to stop the worst offenders since I really don't want to block any legitimate members. If your forum isn't super active, or if you just want to stop this temporary wave, you could certainly set it more aggressively.

100 guests browsing individual threads shouldn't be using much bandwidth, though, so if they're not actually causing a functional problem on the site, I might be tempted to just ignore them

 

[DaveM]

Well the first thing you need to do is really setup your Spam Management in your ACP, this will stop them from getting into your forum to star off with.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Well the first thing you need to do is really setup your Spam Management in your ACP, this will stop them from getting into your forum to star off with.

Yeah... this.

I use the entire TAC Anti-Spam collection and it has essentially purged my forum of all spam. I now get approximately 1-2 spam posts per day, all of which are caught in the moderation queue (and thus don't appear to regular users), and another 2-3 spammers who try to put links in their profile, which are blocked by the StopHumanSpam module.

This is down from about a dozen or more spam posts per day which were not getting caught in the moderation queue, and literally dozens of bots each day who had spam profile links which I was manually deleting once a week, all on vBulletin.

 

[Brent W]

I've found blocking Ukraine, China, Russia and Pakistan has killed the majority of spam that hits my site. It allowed me to uninstall all anti-spam add-ons I was using and now I am simply using built in XenForo spam prevention.

If you sign up for the free cloudflare plan, they make it really easy to block countries.

 

[Bram]

I had exactly the same. You can simply block their registration by adding a human verification question.

 

[Ridemonkey]

I've found blocking Ukraine, China, Russia and Pakistan has killed the majority of spam that hits my site. It allowed me to uninstall all anti-spam add-ons I was using and now I am simply using built in XenForo spam prevention.

It would seem to me that using plugins to prevent spam would be a superior solution to blocking the better part of 2 billion people from using your website.

I had exactly the same. You can simply block their registration by adding a human verification question.

The OP's problem is that they're guests, not registered users.

 

[Bram]

Jep, we had the same, moved all the spamposts to the archive (which can't be accessed by guests) and after a couple of days this bad traffic goes away.

 

[Brent W]

It would seem to me that using plugins to prevent spam would be a superior solution to blocking the better part of 2 billion people from using your website.

When those better part of 2 billion people don't even register in the 1% of traffic it does make sense. Just started blocking a few days ago.