How to reduce spam

In other news, is there anything we can do to help cut down on the amount of spam, other than reporting/deleting it on sight? There's been quite a bit of it recently. I know I've reported three or four instances of spam just here in Comms this week, including one that I just reported and just got deleted a few minutes ago. I don't know how much, if any, is getting into other areas of the boards. Any ideas?

 

I report a lot as well and I notice this past week it's all times of day instead of the usual late at night.

 

A lot of the spammers are from Eastern Europe so they tend to hit in the early hours US time. I've also seen some with US IPs and they would hit later in the day. Comms and WNU seem to be their current Happy Hunting Grounds. The boards here have a nice Spam Cleaner - deletes the spam, bans the spammer, and checks the spammer's IP for other users. If the IP isn't shared by legitimate users and isn't a mobile or AOL IP we can then ban it if other spammers share it.
We do have a CAPTCHA question feature which new users have to answer, and periodically we rotate the questions around. Maybe we need to do that again.
If you see spam and it hasn't been cleaned fairly quickly feel free to report it. I know there are times when there are only a few of us mods online and a heads-up is appreciated.

 

With a CAPTCHA, ideally every single person accessing it should be presented with a different one, rather than having a single question for everyone that's merely changed out occasionally. I would recommend reCAPTCHA.

 

We actually have a pool of questions it randomly pulls from. In addition, the last time we switched to reCAPTCHA we saw an increase in the number of spammers registering.

 

Have you considered combining it with the image CAPTCHA? On RPM, we have ours cranked up to its highest setting, which has deterred many a bot. It makes registering a bit more frustrating for those of us with poor eyesight, but we've been relatively bot-free.

We also have the board set for admins to approve members, which is something I have to do on occasion. Haven't had too much bot trouble since we reset our CAPTCHA.

 

Our options are reCAPTCHA exclusive or question pool, or yes, we would turn on some more things.

Reinstating manual approval (Which we were doing towards the end on the temp boards) is a nuclear option that I'd prefer not to take again, because ultimately spam cleaning is not as much of a hassle as inconveniencing new users for an indefinite period of time and preemptive sorting is.

 

Yeah, spam-removal is certainly easier than sorting through members. I admit to getting lazy with that, as having to check IPs and hostnames through my various sources is tedious, particularly if I have a number of members to go through.

Aside from ReCAPTCHA options, it's looking like having vigilant people to find and report the spam will do. When RPM was having a bot problem, I wished people would've been more vigilant and helped me to find and eradicate them. It's nice to just have another set of eyes sometimes.

Does Xenforo have mods you could install? It's entirely possible that someone may have made a bot-detector or bot-deterrent. I know of such mods for Simple Machines, but I'm not sure the amount of customizability for Xenforo.

 

Spam removal in XenForo is just one single click. It automatically bans, deletes posts, makes IP checks and even sends the spammer a strongly worded e-mail. So it's not really that much of a hassle.

 

Purely out of curiosity, can that email be posted here for our amusement?

 

I agree, I want to see it! Might give me ideas on what similar mods I can look for for RPM.

 

I've caught spam quite a bit in SWC and the occasional one in EU. Usually in the early morning hours.

I report it and it gets taken care of within an hour or two....

 

I normally catch some of the SWC ones as it's too early for the SWC mods. We have a thread in Mod Squad where we report actions taken on boards other than those we normally mod on..

 

And we love you for it LAJ.

 

the definition of spam here is too high(or low), normally spam is considered this: "

not here, posting 100% Star Wars related content that is not offensive either, is considered spam.

it reminds me of the Santa Claus robot in Futurama, who considers all humans evil

 

That definition works for the bulk of the stuff I've cleaned up.

 

andresfelix If you have issues with the terms under which you were banned you can contact the moderator in question via PM for a rules clarification.

 

Perhaps you should try Captcha or random question related to the major of the forum? I think it works very well.
Anyway, thanks all you guys for supporting me many ways to prevent spammers.

 

Spambots seem to be working overtime tonight...

 

Yeah - tis the season. If you see any that hasn't been handled within 5-10 minutes feel free to use the Report function on it.

 

Uh... a couple of the ones last night were apparently porn sites, from the keywords that accompanied the links. (I'm not stupid enough to click on the links. )

 

I think I got a couple of those before I went offline. (And I'm not stupid enough to do that either.)

 

Dealt with a good few you've reported recently, and it's much appreciated, make no mistake about it - same for everyone else who reports these pests. Simply using the Report function straight away for obvious spam is a huge help to keeping these boards in order.

 

Especially during periods when only a few mods are online - seeing numbers in the Report section are like a red flag..