bogus automated forum signups

[sailor]

any one else getting a lot of these in the past year? ours have gone out of sight. always with addresses from we.de and mail.ru and mymail.in for signup addresses. are these spammers or actual bots doing this?? any tricks on killing them?

[Artashes]

Woohoo Jeff!

Tell me about it. This is actually a new type of spam you CANNOT protect yourself from. At least you are not going to get rid of it easy.

How it happens:
The account-signing process is accomplished by real humans, so email and image verification processes are by-passed without sweat. These accounts then submitted to a spam-generating script to play with.

How to prevent it:
You cannot stop it at source, banning email domains and IPs won't be effective as well. Here are a couple of things to help yourself. Since most of this spam generate new threads, create a permission that would allow users to create new threads only in the event of them having replied to other threads first. I had colleagues telling me it helped reduce the number of them.

If you run vBulletin, I came across this mod today (Mark of AvidInteractive actually pointed me to it):
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=109258
It allows the system to analyze the post for certain words and send posts to recycle bin should the words of interest match with the content of a post.

Hope this gives a couple of ideas.

[JanS]

This is a great addition if you have vB3.6.* http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=124828, that sure knocks em off the scale Failing that, banning emal addresses is good. There is a huge list of them at http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=27175. Obviously some of those you can't ban from signup, but if you get a bunch from certain IPs, then ban the IP We CAN beat em!

[ldcdc]

How it happens:
The account-signing process is accomplished by real humans, so email and image verification processes are by-passed without sweat. These accounts then submitted to a spam-generating script to play with.

Another great thing that offshoring has helped bring about.

Though I'm not exactly sure that the whole show is not run by natives.

We CAN beat em!

I always though women should be fighting the wars. Men just don't have the right spirit.

[Marks]

Interesting. Mod. Lets see if DCT will implement it

[country-tyme]

Installed the humanizer and visual verification and haven't had any problems since. Things were really out of hand. There is a way around the humanizer if someone is really persistant, but most spam signups up bot related.