Anti-spam suggestion

[madalu]

I've been fighting spammers as a forum administrator myself, using the phpBB platform, and I've found that there are two ways to win:

1. Approve all new members manually (lots of work), and

2. Add a question-and-answer to the registration screen (not much work). New members have to answer correctly in order to be approved. The question can be very easy (e.g. yellow liquid, three letters? answer: pee), but since it requires actual thinking the spambots can't crack it. Eventually a real live spammer may crack it manually and give the answer to the bots, at which point you can change the question.

Unfortunately it seems that the spambots have figured out e-mail authentication, so forcing users to provide a valid address doesn't help much.

You could also try implementing a more complex Captcha that is more difficult for spammers, but that comes at the cost of making it harder for people to interpret.

[MissPiss]

I've been fighting spammers as a forum administrator myself, using the phpBB platform, and I've found that there are two ways to win:

1. Approve all new members manually (lots of work), and

2. Add a question-and-answer to the registration screen (not much work). New members have to answer correctly in order to be approved. The question can be very easy (e.g. yellow liquid, three letters? answer: pee), but since it requires actual thinking the spambots can't crack it. Eventually a real live spammer may crack it manually and give the answer to the bots, at which point you can change the question.

Unfortunately it seems that the spambots have figured out e-mail authentication, so forcing users to provide a valid address doesn't help much.

You could also try implementing a more complex Captcha that is more difficult for spammers, but that comes at the cost of making it harder for people to interpret.

For now I would just manually approve all accounts. I know it's a lot of work but you could just do it maybe once a week. Every Friday or something. . .and specify that in the sign-up form. It will just make people more anxious and appreciative to be here.

Lizz

[Wet Set]

Believe it or not, one of the reasons I delayed moving to a forum like this is because I actually had far more control over the old system! Although it may not have seemed like it to posters, I was successfully able to block tons of spam because I could edit the programs that controlled it. That's a LOT harder to do with a system like this.

Anyway... I love your suggestion (number 2) and I will have to find out how to implement it. I will most probably be in touch with you soon.

Paul

[Wet Set]

Approving new members?

Hi Madalu & Lizz,

If we decided to approve all new members (uggg!) I don't understand how you know that a potential new member is going to be a spam bot? Or do we guess based on the name or something?

Paul

[TVGuy]

Manual approval

Hi Paul,

When I first launched the HD Wetting forum I had it set up so I had to manually approve everyone who signed up. It didn't help at all in preventing spam, I had no way of telling if the registrant was a real person or a spam bot. The whole thing was a giant waste of time. Switching to an automatic system resulted in no more spam-bots than I had when I was manually approving everyone.

[Wet Set]

Thanks

Thanks for clarifying that. I thought it would be pretty hard to tell. I do like the asking a question idea though, so I need to find out how to implement that.

Paul

[Wet Trousers]

When Skymouse had exactly that issue on the Wetting Her Panties board, on which I am am a moderator, he set it up so that new users could post but these posts were in quarantine, visible to moderators but not other users. Newcomers are asked to make an initial post about themselves. That defeats a bot - but does need Sky to approve every member and has cut use of the board.

[steve]

On my forum, I had problems even with the question regime. Unfortunately harsh spam filtering techniques lead to a reduction in users; it's amazing what even a little inconvenience can do to a potential registerer.

I suppose another option is system of moderators that 'cover the clock'. An active team of mods won't stop spammers posting, but it will clean it up very very quickly.

[pissed_myself]

My Opinion....

My opinion would be a little of all three major ideas.... (a) a simple question.... yellow liquid, three letters (and similar).... (b) a standard captcha... and (c) a team of moderators that randomly keep an eye on things..... that should pretty much take care of 99% of problems.

[Apemantus]

My opinion would be a little of all three major ideas.... (a) a simple question.... yellow liquid, three letters (and similar).... (b) a standard captcha... and (c) a team of moderators that randomly keep an eye on things..... that should pretty much take care of 99% of problems.

Agreed - surely the lengths a spammer would have to go to in order to correctly answer the first two would deter most, and any persistent ones, the mods can find and kick off.

[Wet Set]

Tentatively hopeful!

I have added the question and answer thing to the registration, plus one other anti spam measure, so... I'm tentatively hopeful that spam will go down.

Paul

[Bob]

Re- Spam

I know that to many this might be pointing out the glaringly obvious but for those who don't know you guys can help with dealing with spam by hitting the report button as soon as it's noticed,then this is then dealt with quickly & efficiently by our team of moderators leaving a nice clean spam free forum
Happy chatting!

[Dice]

Q&A is definitely the best fight against bot spam at the moment. The manual approval way can work okay if you have the time, as when you get a registration you just check the IP or email address used with a forum spam website, and as long as you are not the first unlucky person to get the spammer then it will be on there, every spammer who has hit my past forums has had their IP or email address on there. See below site. Oh and if you have a members list you can often tell the spammers by the fact they tend to add a WWW address in their sign up to help boost their google ratings. Looks like Paul has installed a 2011 build though of his forum, see the date at the very bottom, so this forum should be pretty rock solid for now.

Useful site : http://www.stopforumspam.com

[pissed_myself]

Awesome....

Seems like we got a good board in place now, some good security and a team of people willing to keep it that way. Thanks so much for keeping the board alive, Paul.

[madalu]

Keep us posted on how well the Q&A works. In my experience it works 100% until a spammer cracks it, at which point you need to change the question.

My other forum is a local community thing, so I can check the location of IP addresses for new members. Approve if from the community. Deny if from another country. I imagine that approach wouldn't work so well on an international board.