Spam Problems

[cdub]

I've been getting a ton of spammer recently that will post a thread saying "welcome to the site!" in response to someone but their sig is a "timesharescam" or something like that.

It's a problem. Are these real people or bots doing this? I had a question and answer CAPTCHA and now I just have normal recaptca.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Amaury]

They're likely humans. Just keep banning them.

 

[cdub]

I do. They keep coming baaaaaaack.

 

[Amaury]

I do. They keep coming baaaaaaack.

If their IP addresses are similar, try IP banning.

 

[cdub]

I do ban them. I guess I'll have to keep on my toes.

I heard that Google was implementing a new Captcha system. Has that been implemented yet?

 

[rdn]

Has that been implemented yet?

XF 1.4.4 soon.

 

[ForestForTrees]

I've never tried this, but I wonder if it would be possible to make it so that people don't have an option to edit their signatures until they have a certain number of posts. You may be able to make it by making a group that can edit signatures and setting it so that normal registered users can't. Then you can set up an automatic promotion to the "sigedit" group when they meet some criteria. Chances are, spammers wouldn't know why they can't edit their signatures any more. They'd likely just give up.

Spam has been bad recently for us, too. I've enabled manual registration approval. There are two groups of spammers coming after us that have been able to get past honey pots in our registration screen (presumably because they are human). It's super easy to determine which of them are spammers based on the location derived from their IP number, so I just block them before they even join.