Spammers

[Trix]

Since moving to Xenforo i am getting flooded, and i mean flooded, with spammers. Signing up with random names and either posting in the forums random spam links, or now they seem to just be posting in a status update.

I changed from Captcha to Q&A and have two questions to answer, and they are still getting through. It's slowly becoming a problem, everytime i log onto my site, i'm spending all my time fighting spam instead of answering threads/posts.

Also when i click 'spam cleaner' and choose ok to the options, once its done it just takes me back to the forum homepage, which is kind of misleading, would be nice to have some kind of confirmation to know somethings worked? I end up going back and double checking.

Anyone have any tips to combat the spam people?

Thanks

 

[Jake Bunce]

This resource has all tips regarding spam:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-forum-spam.980/

 

[Cal]

Check the resource area as well. Many of our add on programmers have done their best to put out solutions to the spam. This one for example aided my greatly in combination with a few others : http://xenforo.com/community/resources/solve-media.1014/

 

[craigiri]

A properly administered forum should have almost no spam at all.
We deal with 22,000 members and 1.2 million posts and almost no spam.

The combination of QA, blocking countries (i don't do this right now, but have in the past), manual activation and Xenutilities or Stop spam here (profile and personal info spam finder) should take care of most.

Manual member activation is a great thing...if you have the time and energy. You can use fuzzy logic (your own brain) by looking at the usernames, the email addresses, checking the IP's, etc.

It's harder to clean most spam after...than to avoid it beforehand. If you make it harder to become a member, the spammers will likely move on, but real members won't.

 

[trilogy33]

Quick tip:
You can eradicate spam globally from a user's homepage field by taking it out of the equation completely...

Admin Control Panel > Appearance > Styles & Templates > Templates > account_personal_details

Add the <xen:comment lines>

<xen:comment>
    <dl class="ctrlUnit">
    <dt><label for="ctrl_homepage">{xen:phrase home_page}:</label></dt>
    <dd><input type="url" name="homepage" value="{$visitor.homepage}" id="ctrl_homepage" class="textCtrl" /></dd>
    </dl>
</xen:comment>

In addition, you can also prevent it from being displayed in user profiles completely...

Admin Control Panel > Appearance > Styles & Templates > Templates > member_view

Add the <xen:comment lines>

<xen:comment>
    <xen:if is="{$user.homepage}">
    <dt>{xen:phrase home_page}:</dt>
    <dd><a href="{xen:string censor, $user.homepage, 'x'}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" itemprop="url">{xen:string censor, $user.homepage}</a></dd>
    </xen:if>
</xen:comment>