Spamming Xenforo

[tommydamic68]

What's going on with the recent spamming of Xenforo? I am
getting these alerts with spam
Bombs since yesterday...

 

[Paul B]

Spam is all over the internet.

It is dealt with when it is found here.

 

[Liam W]

I think the bots are getting cleverer. Never used to happen as much here.

 

[Jeremy]

It doesn't happen much more now than it has in the last few months, more just happened to get through in recent days.

 

[Liam W]

It doesn't happen much more now than it has in the last few months, more just happened to get through in recent days.

I get an email for practically every spam thread. There's been more recently, but I don't really care so lets just drop it.

 

[Paul B]

What makes you think they are bots?

Human spammers are prolific.

 

[Chris D]

I think the bots are getting cleverer. Never used to happen as much here.

Possibly before your time, but in days of XF 1.1.3 and below it was pretty bad here. It was really bad here until they moved from reCAPTCHA to Q&A and until 1.1.4 introduced the registration form timer.

And of course anti-spam has gone from strength to strength in subsequent versions so it has got better.

Even if it has increased over the last few days, it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Testament to how strong the anti-spam measures are now

We have a big problem with human spammers at ValveTime.net. Nothing filters them out automatically, not even Fool Bot Honey Pot, because, by nature, that targets bots. It's always going happen with humans.

I don't know whether XenForo.com uses Akismet scanning. I do on Xen Media Gallery and it has worked quite well in catching the dodgy content before it is made visible.

 

[Liam W]

I think I came here just after 1.1.3 was released

I forget spammers can be real. Just don't get them.

 

[Jeremy]

They get paid and people will do anything for money?

 

[Liam W]

They get paid and people will do anything for money?

How much money do these people have though.

But yes, I could probably go on my Facebook and £5 would have my sites spammed all over the internet.

 

[Amaury]

We've been getting profile spammers on KH-Flare, though it's only been about one a day, if that.

 

[Chris D]

Human spammers quite commonly modify their signatures, about me, homepage and other profile fields.

I'm actually finding the User Change Log to be an incredibly useful tool to discover spam.

 

[Amaury]

Human spammers quite commonly modify their signatures, about me, homepage and other profile fields.

I'm actually finding the User Change Log to be an incredibly useful tool to discover spam.

Yeah, lately I've only been discovering them about a day after they register on the Latest Member field on the forum list. I think I'm just not paying enough attention or the cron job runs sometime after I see that area.

 

[tommydamic68]

Human spammers quite commonly modify their signatures, about me, homepage and other profile fields.

I'm actually finding the User Change Log to be an incredibly useful tool to discover spam.

Hence why I no longer have any options in the user profile for a "homepage." (edited template.) Even with Vbulletin - they targeted the "homepage" option most frequent.

 

[dawg]

Nothing new here. Forums have been dealing with spam since the days they were coded in Perl. As long as someone is making money they will find a way. If you are looking to completely wipe it out that will never happen on your forum or anyone else's.
I have been using the default Recaptcha and it stops most of them. If you are using questions and answers i would switch. I dont know why but with questions and answers spammers get out of control on my forums.

 

[rainmotorsports]

We got hit recently from Pakistan IP's mostly registering as 24 year old females. After an update to 1.3.3 and I updated FoolBotHoneyPot which we use and takes care of 99% of our spam, things went back to normal. Not sure if they stopped or a change in FoolBotHoneyPot stopped them. Based on the logs from that plugin they seemed almost like human registrations but still had suggestions of automation.

 

[DRE]

Human spammers quite commonly modify their signatures, about me, homepage and other profile fields.

I'm actually finding the User Change Log to be an incredibly useful tool to discover spam.

After I disabled signatures and used @tenants TAC addon that made it so that noobs can't post links unless they meet certain requirements, I noticed that I stopped getting human spam.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We put all new users' posts into a moderation queue for x number of posts. So, almost no spam has made it through to the forum. (Had a moderator goof and approve some, but eh, we're human. )

All users are also manually approved, so we also weed out janky looking profiles before they even post. Here, we watch for obvious clues (profile says New York, IP address says Pakistan, for example). I also keep an eye on the StopForumSpam thingy--if that shows up, we always click the IP address and more often than not, it's from countries that have no legit visitors to our forum.

The manual approvals and moderation queue take time, but we have the staff to stay on top of it.

 

[davb]

rudy, but how did you run forum in the initial stages, I find it difficult to develop where there are no posts and new threads are in the que of moderation.

 

[Carlos]

We've been getting profile spammers on KH-Flare, though it's only been about one a day, if that.

Same here, I just apply the ban, and then apply the discouragement features offered by xenForo software. IP Discourage and IP Ban, that'll keep the spammers in a hell loop.

Then, after a while, I start deleting their accounts.