We switched over from VB to XenForo. I'm now sure how VB dealed with this, but there barely was a spam problem under VB and no manual action had to be taken against individual spammers. Now with Xenforo, there are a lot of new account registrations that XenForo detects because of matches against StopForumSpam. So XenForo puts them in the Approval Queue. (I don't know what VB did with these, but we didn't have a spam problem. Or maybe the spammers are not interested in VB?)
I suspect that these new account registrations are indeed spammers, because they are often Russian email addresses and have StopForumSpam matches such as: email: 59, ip: 45. (Or does StopForumSpam contain a lot of false positives?)
Apart from the small questions above, my main question is: What should I do with these in the Approval Queue? The user state of these accounts is "Awaiting approval". The best action against them would be to simply ignore them and keep them in a awaiting state, right? If they know that they are banned, than they can learn from it, and adapt to avoid the Approval Queue. Having them in the "Awaiting approval" state gives them less feedback, which makes it harder for them. But the problem with this approach is that the Approval Queue is stacking up. I would like to clean the Queue without giving spammers any feedback. Is this possible?
I suspect that these new account registrations are indeed spammers, because they are often Russian email addresses and have StopForumSpam matches such as: email: 59, ip: 45. (Or does StopForumSpam contain a lot of false positives?)
Apart from the small questions above, my main question is: What should I do with these in the Approval Queue? The user state of these accounts is "Awaiting approval". The best action against them would be to simply ignore them and keep them in a awaiting state, right? If they know that they are banned, than they can learn from it, and adapt to avoid the Approval Queue. Having them in the "Awaiting approval" state gives them less feedback, which makes it harder for them. But the problem with this approach is that the Approval Queue is stacking up. I would like to clean the Queue without giving spammers any feedback. Is this possible?