XF 1.5 What to do against spammers?

[rhodes]

I have a problem with spammers in my forum since a few days. At night new users register with cryptic names like "ashsadktrzh" and post up to 300 posts. I use the SPAM features of XF and reCaptcha to register.

The verification of IP addresses revealed that they come from China or Hong Kong. I blocked the IP addresses as well as the email domains, but in vain. The next day the game starts all over again. Now I wonder how I should deal with it.

• Is it possible to limit the number of postings for new users?
• The posts are in Chinese. Can't I automatically reject Chinese posts as spam?
• Is a question + answer or media captcha better?

 

[Martok]

Are you using all of the spam features in XF ie have you registered with StopForumSpam, Project HoneyPot and Akismet and have valid keys in your spam management settings?
What is your minimum time between messages set to, the default of 30 seconds? (With that setting, it would take 2.5 hours of constant posting to hit 300 posts).

It might be worth you using Q&A with questions based around your forum. I use them on mine based on PlayStation Gaming and it seems to have worked well.

If you have a continued problem you could set up the Registered group to have their posts moderated and then set up a user group promotion for members who have 5 (or more) posts to be promoted to a user group which doesn't have posts moderated. Whilst this won't stop spam posts, it means that spammers posts would all be moderated and unseen by ordinary members. You'd see them in the approval queue and could spam clean them all from there.

 

[ENF]

Q&A with questions related to our niche stopped spammers dead in their tracks. The rest are caught through SFS. The only spam we get now is a human who knows our niche trying to make accounts and post illicit ad links. New member posts are moderated, so none of it actually gets seen.

 

[rhodes]

have you registered with StopForumSpam, Project HoneyPot and Akismet

I have registered with Akismet and Honeypot now...