XF 1.4 Spam is killing my Xenforo site experience

[leemy]

Every morning, I find new spam posts on my site, visible to users (not moderated). Since my site is still rather small and new, the spam posts are a majority of new posts on the site, and users have vocalized that they don't want to come to the site since it's always just spam.

I've taken every step I see possible in Xenforo to stop the spam, but the registrations and non-moderated threads continue. I've attached screenshots of my Spam Management panel in Xenforo, which I'm sure has blocked some but has not been an adequate solution. I've routinely made the triggers more sensitive, to go back in time more than the default; I've enabled Project Honey Pot API key; I've enabled Askimet; I've tried both the default CAPTCHA and recently switched to Google's noCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.

This is really ruining the experience for my very few users. Help please?

 

[JamesBrown]

I have had pretty good results using the Q and A catchpa, still getting a few human spammers but questions seem to stop the bots

 

[Paul B]

Add spam phrases or moderate the first x posts.

 

[nodle]

I just use a Question and Answer and never have had any problems.

 

[leemy]

Added Q&A for registration, will see.

 

[Russ]

Added Q&A for registration, will see.

Spam phrases as @Brogan mentioned can help wonders. Depending on the type of forum you run it could be easy to type in some general terms.

steroids, weight loss, drugs ect, all it will do is send the post to moderation where you can clean it up or approve the post before it goes public.

 

[Paul B]

Yup.

We use them here and very few posts make it through as publicly visible.

 

[Brent W]

Yup.

We use them here and very few posts make it through as publicly visible.

Mind sharing what is used here?

 

[melbo]

Added Q&A for registration, will see.

You have to make your Q&As good ones.

What is 2 + 2? is not good
If I have ten and 10 but take away eighteen how many do I have? is better

Best of all would be questions that are specific to your forum so your prospective users will 'get' them:
So, for a forum about milk:
Q: What is the name of the mammal that produces the substance that we're discussing:
A: cow, cows, goat, goats
etc

I try to trick bots and also non native- english speakers.
Rotate to new questions every 3 months or so as the bots are learning them.

 

[jeffwidman]

You're most likely hitting problems with human spammers... bots are stopped reasonably well by the honeypot/captcha stuff. This is not uncommon these days--very cheap to hire folks in certain countries to manually spam.

I set my forums so first two posts by all new users are moderated. Once they've had two posts approved, moderation goes away. Takes very little time to manage...

Solved all our problems.

 

[Paul B]

Same, except I do 5 posts.

It explains how to do that here: https://xenforo.com/help/user-group-promotions/

 

[m1ne]

Make all posts containing http* moderate for users with less than 5 posts. I get hit with spam every morning but nobody ever sees it.

 

[JamesBrown]

Make all posts containing http* moderate for users with less than 5 posts. I get hit with spam every morning but nobody ever sees it.

How do you achieve this?

 

[m1ne]

Built in spam management, use the phrases.

 

[rainmotorsports]

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.70418/

Block the as names and host names of the spammers and you will rid yourself of having to moderate them at all.

We got 80% of ours from Airtel in India and 2 hosts in Pakistan. The rest come through VPNs worldwide.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We use Q&A plus we moderate the first posts made, which helps with spam and trolling. We also restrict access to certain forum features and forum areas until they pass that same number of posts. (Once they reach that "bogey," we add them to a "Verified" secondary usergroup which opens up the features and removes restrictions.)

New users also must be manually approved--we are a very busy forum, but have a lot of staff to handle it. There are common themes to usernames, and usually if registrations come from certain countries overseas (based on IP), we know they are spam and delete the accounts immediately. StopForumSpam isn't foolproof, but we know how to interpret results to keep the spammers out. And what we don't catch there gets caught in moderation.