Spam User Control

[CADTutor]

In recent months, this forum has become a target for spammers. Forum spam comes in 2 forms.

First are posts that link to sites with adult content, online gambling or drug sales. This type of spam is relatively easy to deal with and our team of moderators have been doing a great job in keeping it under control.

The second type of spam is in the form of bogus user registrations. The aim here is for the spammer to leave a link to a dubious website in the user profile. This type of spam is a little more difficult to deal with as it is very time consuming to check out every new user website. Although we are doing our best, inevitably, some get missed - we had 450 new user registrations last month.

The main incentive in this second type of spam is that the spammer can leave a weblink on a popular forum site. In view of this and in an effort to prevent spam, I have removed the option to add a website link to user profiles.

I hope that this will be only a temporary measure but it is important to prevent this sort of attack on our forum as it could, if unchallenged, make the forum unusable.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the moderator team for their help in keeping this forum safe and clean.

[HoustonPhotog]

i forget...

do you require user email verification before the people's accounts become active. that usually keeps spammers from sending pm's since they have to not only register, but verify the email account they registered with by responding to an email sent to that addy. slowing them down often deters them and cause them to move on.

im an administrator for a forum and i know there are a few items to put in place that can make it a bit more difficult for spammers.

like for instance no PM priveledges until "x" amount of posts etc etc..

just a thought

[CADTutor]

This forum does require email verification. However, phpBB builds the user profile even if the account is not verified. As a matter of course, I delete all users who have not verified after 30 days of registering, so that catches that one.

The privileges idea is a good one but control for this is limited in phpBB. We will shortly be moving to vBulletin and that has far more options to control that sort of thing.

What forum software are you using?

[HoustonPhotog]

i use Vbulletin but i had phpbb prior to that...

i know in VB i set the option so that unconfirmed users have zero permissions other than to read the forum...

they cant pm, post etc unless they confirm the email. i dont recall if phpbb offers that or not but im sure if it doesnt, theres a hack out there for it.

[Bloodwig80]

glad to hear youre making the switch to vB. and yeah spam sucks.

[Bloodwig80]

speaking of spam

http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=38702

[StykFacE]

yeah the spam is kept under pretty good control here, and i'm glad you all take the time out to get rid of it.

i wish it could be against the law to do that crap, but i'm guessing it'll never happen. it's too hard to catch, etc. anywho, i'm okay with the change, as long as i can help out and get help every now and again i'm all good. lol

:thumbsup: