Spammers?

[JennyorAlice]

What methods do you use to try to prevent spammers from joining your forum? What do you do to the spammer if one gets through?

 

[DanielGarneau]

For the WordPress portion of my site I use Akismet and CloudFlare. For the MyBB forum part, I am currently investigating options. It would seem that my CloudFlare setup will protect my MyBB forum as much as it does my WordPress site, because it operates at the level of my domain, and my forum will be located within the same domain in a structure such as mydomainname/myforumname/.

As far as the forum part of my site, I've heard of something called ZB Block, that could apparently be used with MyBB, but really I'm just beginning to investigate this.

 

[Christopher1]

I know that wordpress has a bunch of anti-spam plugins that are available. A lot of are available for free. On the forum side of things, we have a really good staff here who ban spammers.

 

[GamesToEnjoy]

The best method is to use CAPTCHA.

 

[Christopher1]

The best method is to use CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA is easy for spambots to bypass.

 

[GamesToEnjoy]

CAPTCHA is easy for spambots to bypass.

So what do you recommend then to stop spammers (as most websites use CAPTCHA)?

 

[Christopher1]

So what do you recommend then to stop spammers (as most websites use CAPTCHA)?

Humans paid for solving CAPTCHAs will successfully solve them.

Also, there are bot programs that solve CAPTCHAS and produce spam/programmed messages. I call these spambots.. Others do as well..

Unfortunately, spammers will always find a way to get through, so really the only way I've found to stop them is to moderate manually... ban spammer IPs manually.. remove spam manually.

Others on this board have mentioned wordpress plug-ins. Depending on what you're using, there will be plug-ins available that will definitely make it harder for spammers to get through, but I think now it's easy to get through CAPTCHA with minimal effort.

If you're using CAPTCHA, make sure there is a delay. If the form is posted within 5 seconds of the page loading ignore the request, most robots will post within less than a second

 

[DanielGarneau]

Current stable version of MyBB has functionalities working along with Stop Forum Spam free services. From what I have been able to understand so far, it would seem that their site provides information about known spammers as well as tools to find out if doubtful registration attempts are from humans inexperienced with forums, or from malicious people, or bots or programs of any sort. It also has a key you can set up within your MyBB or other forum software driven site.

This is the option I am going to concentrate in investigating now, because, it would appear that tools such as Akismet that do this automatically and which work well for WordPress, or ZB Block that can work with either WordPress or forum software or both, must be monitored for their false positive in cases of forums. So I decided that for the time being, I will first of all try to understand the problem with Stop Forum Spam proposals and tools.

In the mean time, I am listening -- or reading -- to whatever anyone has to say about the question of preventing, stopping or blocking spam an one's own web site in general and on one's own forum in particular.

Thank you to all who contribute to this thread, it is of great help in getting to grasp some of the issues involved.

 

[DanielGarneau]

I have been working hard in the week or so that has gone by since my last two posts, and finally, for reasons I don't want to discuss right now, I decided to go with PhpBB instead of with MyBB.

Current version of MyBB has the Stop Forum Spam integrated into its core. Current version of PhpBB (3.1.9) makes it available through an extension. In any case, you end up with the same set of functionalities.

Since my last post in the present thread, and because I am going to use PhpBB 3.1.9, I discovered an extension called "Sortables Captcha." You, the forum owner, create questions related to your forum niche, and people who want to register to your site have to slide the answers that match the question from one column to another. People interested in your forum would be able to answer your questions, while spam bots or people paid to provide answers that spambots cannot find on their own should find it difficult to answer your questions.

I'm still interested in reading what anyone has to say on the question of forum security.

 

[WizeFox22]

CAPTCHA is a nice first step but as mentioned, it doesn't stop everything. I do self monitoring for the time being.

 

[DanielGarneau]

Thank you @WizeFox22,

Basically, I decided starting out with the easiest to resolve CAPTCHA I now have set up on my site, which is the default one. I like it because it won't be any trouble for humans to resolve in a very brief instant. If I have to leave my board unmonitored for more than a day or so, then I will use the CAPTCHA version I mentioned earlier, which is said to be a little more difficult for machine or human spammers to resolve.

At this stage of my site's life (just beginning), I was thinking that I might close the board for new registrations if I have to leave for a vacation period for example, only allowing current members to post, or perhaps even not. But actually, I don't really know what will be best... And I'll remain open to whatever suggestions...

 

[MrPanos]

Hello,

Have you ever used CloudFlare? You can check their security features here: https://www.cloudflare.com/features-security/
It is very useful and it will certainly decrease the number of the spammers who visit your forum.

 

[DanielGarneau]

I configured my domain to go through CloudFlare several months ago now. I made this move after observing that my user base was coming from all around the planet, and when I began to realize that it could take up to 8 seconds to load my site from certain parts of the world. That made me work very hard at optimizing my site. Spam on my site has not been a major problem. I'd say I get a couple of spam posts every two to three weeks, but they are not allowed to publish on my site unless I approve of their comments.

My forum is on the same domain as my site, but so far and for the most part I have been overlooking that fact. I went and read just now the security features described by CloudFlare, and I guess this all means I can relax a little more than I thought I could for my forum.

Thank you @Mr.Panos for your post, which is in fact nothing but good news to me!

 

[Zil]

Google's CAPTCHA, Stop Forum Spam configuration, and throwing up Cloudflare which is the ultimate tool when combating spammers/bots.

 

[Allenafaith]

I have the CAPTCHA enabled, Stop Forum Spam, and email verification. I really don't do anything else other than that.

 

[xXInfectedXx]

Most of the time I didn't get spammers signing up on my forum because of the security measures I had in place. If the user did get through the system, I would Ban+IP Ban it and add the spammer to stopforumspam if the spammer isn't already listed in the database. I think it happened a couple of times, but I didn't have to do this on a regular occasion.