Spammers

[Stepashka]

It’s getting really annoying when your board gets a little bit popular! You don’t have really powerful tools to block people who spam your board with there ads!

I suggest developers will include one extra setting in ipb3 that allows you to set time that new users need to wait until they have the option to create a new topic or post. 7 days for example… I don’t think spammers have the pation to wait such a long time.

[3DKiwi]

Just moderate all new members posts. Myself and others have explained how to set this up in the past. After a couple of posts they then get auto promoted to a regular member group. Works at my busy site.

3DKiwi

[Rikki]

7 days for example

[Tarun]

They did something like this on HydrogenAudio forums. You had to wait 2 weeks before you could post. I had a critical bug to report and eventually forget due to that stupid wait.

[Anonymous IPB User]

I haven't had a spammer on my forum in a long time. What I did to eliminate this issue was to require a custom profile field when registering in which I specifically ask them to enter a four digit year (expected input is nnnn), but allow a maximum entry of 10 characters (bots will fill the box to the max and be denied registration) You can add a few more of these required profile fields for added security (I would suggest making sure they are relevant to your sites content of course). Before implementing this, I used to get a lot of spam on the forums.

[RTM]

Some of the more advanced SPAM outfits are using human "bots" hired to do registrations and validations and being paid between $0.03 and $0.10 per validated registration on sites with larger member bases (i.e. over 1000 users) simply to get the exposure under the member directory.

I think a combination of bot protection (captcha in various forms) and new posting moderation... (but not across-the-board multi-day delays) works....

There is no purely technical solution, IMHO.

Rob

[Morrigan]

There is also flood control. If you want them to wait make them obey flood control.

[atomicknight]

There is no purely technical solution, IMHO.

Not at the moment, no. But there are some companies that claim to have developed anti-spam systems based on behavioral patterns, which would likely solve most problems with bots (assuming that they work). Of course, such systems probably won't be available for some time (at least, effective systems probably won't be publicly available), so that's not really worth waiting for.

[chilli]

Hey...who doesn't like Spam? :) Spam is everything for anything. Everyone loves Spam. :D