XF 1.4 Urgent Spam Problem on Xenforo

[PetForums]

Hi all, my forum has been under a major spam attach for the past few days, with today being even worse, and i'm running out of ways to try and stop it.

I have made many changes recently to stop new people posting links and banning many spam phrases which seemed to work initially. Now all spam coming through is from japan/asia and is all in a foreign language, a sample is below with no links:

라이브카지노✰█『 700ＢＯＸ.ＣＯＭ 』█✰라이브카지노,라이브카지노

I have added phrases to ban as below but they keep changing the characters everytime.

ＣＯＭ
.ＣOＭ
.ＣoＭ
.ＣＯＭ


Our forum is a UK website and i'm running out of options to prevent this. I have had the questions and answer option set on registration, and have been changing the questions daily, but spammers are still registering all the time. I changed today to solve media captcha and within 2 minutes, new spammers where registering.

Has anyone got a similar problem with spam and any solution to prevent this? I do not want to approve new users manually , as we got about 100 genuine users a day and 100 spammers, so it would take ages for our moderators to go through this.

The ideas I had was to check users IP addresses and if they are not coming from an english speaking country then block access.

Also would there be a way to reject any posts that don't contain standard english/langauge characters?

many thanks

 

[Paul B]

If the IP addresses of the spammers are in a similar range then you can ban them but that will also affect any legitimate visitors using the same range.

You can also configure the server to block based on IP or location - again legitimate visitors will suffer.

Other than that it's case of tweaking the spam settings to try and capture the most common cases.

 

[PetForums]

Thanks for your response, I would rather just prevent certain countries from registering rather than block for viewing if possible.

I've gone through all the spammers and the IPs are all from the countries below :

Republic of Korea
Philippines

 

[Paul B]

It's not possible to prevent certain IP addresses from registering only.

 

[Xon]

There are a number of add-ons which can do this. The one I use (and have contributed code to) is @W1zzard 's TPU: Detect and Block Spam Registrations

 

[PetForums]

There are a number of add-ons which can do this. The one I use (and have contributed code to) is @W1zzard 's TPU: Detect and Block Spam Registrations

Hi, Thanks for the advice, I have installed this add-on and so far it is working brilliantly and has stopped my forum spam problem for the moment. I've even turned off the captcha on my registration page.