Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications By Matt November 11, 2024
Besttechie Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 Lately, I've noticed a huge influx of spammers on my forum, so much so that I had to upgrade from my lifetime license which I purchased in 2005 to the new type of license to gain access to IPB's Spam Monitoring service. While the service works well and bans a majority of the spammers before they can post, I still have a huge number of spam registrations per day. I'd like to request that if a registration matches a known spammer that they be denied registration. In other words, don't even bother letting the account signup. I'm also interested in any possible explanation for the sudden increase in forum spammers? I've been running an IPB forum since 2004 and I've never seen anything like this. Thanks, Jeff
Malwarebytes Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 I absolutely agree with this. If Invision could add another option to the list, such as "Deny registration" -- that would be optimal. It doesn't have to be the default one, but your customers will definitely want the option. At some point, the number of banned spammers will surpass the number of valid users and then the forums look bad to the community. Granted, we can go in and remove any banned users in bulk, but that would also remove any users we banned for other reasons. Please consider this for the next version of IPB. Best regards, Marcin
Rick L Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 I dont see it , as the domains and emails as well as IP's are changing by the minute , so unless you block huge chinks of IP's , thats not possible. There are many ways to deal with this , worst case scenerio , enforce all new sign ups to be validated manually. Daily , run through them and you can really at a glance see that a user with the name of " 44466633388@44466655577.com is a borked up email. I'm sure theres better ways, but with at the least 50 and up to 150 or so new sign ups a day , you can't catch them all by any service afaik. Supposedly , captcha was broken several weeks ago. So there in there. My own thoughts are that certain services are posing as spammers to get closer looks into the forum , which would otherwise be left past there permissions.
Malwarebytes Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 Honestly, we are not expecting a solution to stop spammers completely. We understand that this will always be a problem. The spam service has definitely helped, but it still allows the registration as a banned members. I think the only thing we are asking for is for Invision to implement a feature that allows us to simply block the spammer from registering if at Code 3 or Code 4. This doesn't have to be the default action, as I said before.
Besttechie Posted February 13, 2011 Author Posted February 13, 2011 Honestly, we are not expecting a solution to stop spammers completely. We understand that this will always be a problem. The spam service has definitely helped, but it still allows the registration as a banned members. I think the only thing we are asking for is for Invision to implement a feature that allows us to simply block the spammer from registering if at Code 3 or Code 4. This doesn't have to be the default action, as I said before. Exactly. And if the spam service can recognize the account as a known spam account while registering, it seems like adding a new option to just totally block them from ever being able to complete registration wouldn't be such a big deal.
Jakeomatic Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 I too noticed an influx, but I just added a custom registration question and answer field and that pretty much completely solved my problem.
Besttechie Posted February 13, 2011 Author Posted February 13, 2011 I too noticed an influx, but I just added a custom registration question and answer field and that pretty much completely solved my problem. I tried that - it did nothing. Out of curiosity, what's your question?
Jakeomatic Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 I tried that - it did nothing. Out of curiosity, what's your question? Q: What color is the sky? A: blue
Malwarebytes Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 The problem with adding a question on a larger board is the following: 1. Not everyone speaks English. While it may be an English board, there are some users that simply sign up to gain access to some of the features. You may argue that the sign up page is in English, but many users know exactly what to do on these types of pages. Asking them a question is different than simply filling in fields they already used to filling in. 2. Cheap labor is making this a moot point. Humans are now being paid 10 cents an hour in certain regions of this planet to fill these out manually. If they can do that, the question and answer section is somewhat pointless. 3. On larger sites especially, the bot writers are looking for these questions and having the bots manually answer them. They can visit the page once a day and make sure the question hasn't changed. If it has, they update the bot to know the answer and it treats it just like every other mandatory field on the sign up page. Don't get me wrong, the fact that IPB 3 provides the question and answer portion is a step forward from IPB 2. It will definitely stop some spammers and we at Malwarebytes are grateful for that. I'll jump back on topic now before this thread gets closed. I'm only requesting that perhaps Invision allows better customization of the Spam Service settings, that's all.
prupdated Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 I'm running the stopforumspam hook from the marketplace plus the IPB spam service. The hook itself stops about 30 spammers per day. That way it has to get past two systems. Also, I have found the option to ban spammers who signup as problematic in a practical sense. This relates to the option in the third party stopforumspam hook and the IPB spam service. What I've found is I really need to only have people banned who are problems at the site. Otherwise, the ban database gets too big. When I go to clear it out, I don't remember who is in there for what. The best option for me is to reject the registration. Either that, or have some kind of automatic temporary bans that clear out after a week or month or so.
Royzee Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 I'd like to request that if a registration matches a known spammer that they be denied registration. In other words, don't even bother letting the account signup. A hook for this already exists. Registration questions work fine for bots, but lately there has been a rash of human spammers. This checks registrations against a DB of over 2 million IPs and emails of known spammers.Forum Spammer IP & Email Check
Malwarebytes Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 Thanks for your reply. I think Jeff and I are both referring to the Invision Spam Service. However, I will check out the hook you mentioned as well!
.Peter Posted February 13, 2011 Posted February 13, 2011 Maybe even auto-ban the IP address? Just by visiting the website.
Robulosity2 Posted February 14, 2011 Posted February 14, 2011 Personally, I'm just getting sick of anytime I do a Database dump to my Dev directory and log into the ACP it f*cks up my license for my live site and breaks the Spam Service checks...
sunrisecc Posted February 14, 2011 Posted February 14, 2011 Personally, I'm just getting sick of anytime I do a Database dump to my Dev directory and log into the ACP it f*cks up my license for my live site and breaks the Spam Service checks... Agreed.
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