XF Webmasters - How are you keeping Spam off of the boards?

lazer

Well-known member
Hey all.

We are due to move our vB site over to xF in the next month and the only area that really concerns us is managing multiple accounts and spammers.
  • Multiple Account Detection
  • StopForumSpam integration
  • Other useful tools
We currently display this for our SuperMods (vBulletin):
Screen Shot 2012-02-27 at 11.48.08.webp
...and the panel shows in every member profile. We also use a vB add-on that detects multiple cookies and IP addresses and posts in a hidden forum to alert staff to potential problems.

With the unfortunate news from g0rn here: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/multiple-account-detection.6373/page-6#post-331130 - I'm not aware of any other supported add-on's that perform a similar function. If there are, please point me in the right direction.

How are you keeping your XF boards clear of spam?
What tools are you using?
Do you have any other tips for us to use?
 
With 1.2 some pretty neat inbuilt spam protection features are expected (http://xenforo.com/community/threads/development-update.25726/#post-311302)

Personally I haven't faced major spam yet, only two bots that went posting and were banned and their content removed easily thanks to the spam cleaner. XF has proved to be good against fighting spam at least for me personally! When I had a community on VB registration of Bot accounts and spam was pretty common but with XF it isn't the same, our board is really free of bot spam.
 
The VB SFS registration check stops around 1,000 SFS listed spammers from registering on our site, every day.

Without XF v1.2 (and the SFS registration integration) is there any other add-on that will do the job?
 
Hey :)

Does that integrate with the registration process (stop them at the door) or is it used to check the SFS database against already registered accounts?
 
With 1.2 some pretty neat inbuilt spam protection features are expected (http://xenforo.com/community/threads/development-update.25726/#post-311302)

Personally I haven't faced major spam yet, only two bots that went posting and were banned and their content removed easily thanks to the spam cleaner. XF has proved to be good against fighting spam at least for me personally! When I had a community on VB registration of Bot accounts and spam was pretty common but with XF it isn't the same, our board is really free of bot spam.


StopForumSpam - will be a big plus factor in XenForo 1.2. Been asking for it to be added previously and glad to see Kier and Mike and done so. Human spammers are a pain these days. When I ran MyBB and used the SFP mod add-on with that, which used to also generate a log file used to record blocked people. It was amazing to see how many each day made it past everything else, "recaptcha, questions and answers" - then got stopped at the last hurdle by SFP. Otherwise they'd have been in registered!

Studying emails used was another interesting thing. Yahoo and Gmail was used the most by them.
 
I don't have any problems with spam, and I don't even use captcha on my sites.

I've got the profiles and Conversations locked down to new members and new members can't add a website address in their profiles, the few spammers on the forums are dealt with super quick with the spam cleaner.
 
It looks like the spammers have now programmed thier bots to work with xenforo.

I've been getting hit quite a bit over the last few days.

Not a big problem though as its dealt with quicker than they can post it.
 
Well, I find that XenUtiles (Tools) does a really good job of keeping spammers from registering (it also creates sitemaps). We don't see too much trouble; at least not yet.

Of course, a native XF solution might be better in the long run.
 
Not one bot in 7 months or so since starting, only human spammers who can get through any system you throw at them. This is XF, theres little need for the anti-spam addons.
 
Well like I said before, I don't use recaptaca or Q&A, as I don't want to make it difficult for new members to join. Any spammers that do get through are dealt with quickly.

Xenforo seems to be at a level where its getting the spammers attention, as I seem to be getting more and more bots.
 
Not one bot in 7 months or so since starting, only human spammers who can get through any system you throw at them. This is XF, theres little need for the anti-spam addons.
I think that XF is still so fresh on the market, that spammers haven't really looked at it, but I think that will change, and then it will be harder to stop them. At the moment, I get no spam registrations, and I am using Re:CAPTCHA, which I know for sure won't stop spammers, or even slow them down. At least it didn't for a site I enabled it for after being hit hard with spammers (60 - 200 registrations per day).
 
I think that XF is still so fresh on the market, that spammers haven't really looked at it, but I think that will change, and then it will be harder to stop them.

I said this here last year when people we're boasting how good XenForo copes with spammers compared to other forum software like vBulletin and IPB, that it was too new on the scene yet. Knew this would happen as it got older and more mature, becoming more a target for spammers. Thankfully, XenForo 1.2 will come with Stop Forum Spam by default, that will block most human spammers and combined with good Questions and Answers used should fair pretty OK. Although, I'd still like to see the option to use all 3 together if you want (or not): reCaptcha, Q/A and SFS.
 
I'd rather see more extensions, more options. I would love to see some mods using their own ideas too captcha, that way you get security through obscurity, which is the best defence against spammers. Spammers are in it for the money, so if the CAPTCHA isn't worth breaking, they won't. Only smaller sites can benefit from this though, at a certain point your site will be worth breaking even if you are using obscure CAPTCHA.
 
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