What attracts spam bots?

[overifist]

My site has been flooded before by bots to the point where it's inaccessible by anyone.

What attracts these bots?

 

[AndyB]

The easiest way to stop spammers is to have a good Question & Answer in the registration. However not all forums are suitable for this, you have to have a forum with a topic that is not too broad. What is your forum about?

 

[overifist]

The easiest way to stop spammers is to have a good Question & Answer in the registration. However not all forums are suitable for this, you have to have a forum with a topic that is not too broad. What is your forum about?

We're a gaming community.
http://thesgn.com/board

 

[W1zzard]

Use my addon: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.2973/

This will block most bots out of the box, and you can tweak the rules to match your userbase and where spam comes from.

 

[overifist]

Use my addon: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.2973/

This will block most bots out of the box, and you can tweak the rules to match your userbase and where spam comes from.

How do I see where they come from?

 

[whynot]

How do I see where they come from?

Their IP let you know.

 

[W1zzard]

The addon adds log output to the spam trigger logs

 

[Alpha1]

What attracts these bots?

Spammer scripts have search capability to locate websites using software the spam script supports. I found that spam bots landed at my sites by searching google for terms that every xenforo board has in the html source.

 

[AndyB]

We're a gaming community.

Unfortunately it appears to be too general of a forum to have Q&A work effectively.

 

[Martok]

Unfortunately it appears to be too general of a forum to have Q&A work effectively.

Depends on the gaming forum. Mine is one of these and Q&A works very well on mine.

 

[SEOmers]

Tools like scrapebox or senuke will track down forum footprints, lets face it. we're easy targets but there are loads of ways of dealing with it


Things they look for are

"Powered by (forum software) then a keyword relevant to their market etc. They go by scale and if you have half decent stats like domain authority, a few members etc then they'll come and try to get backlinks etc

 

[dvsDave]

Unpatched forums give off a sort of sickly smell, that spambots are attracted too. Applying patches usually makes the smell go away.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

What attracts these bots?

Being online! Being unsecured, online.