Has anyone else seen a large increase in registered spam accounts even with all of the spa settings in place? Even bogus looking emails are passing right through to 'member' level accounts and I don't understand how they are passing the question and answer challenge and captcha.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks,

I've not, as I change my question when it's discovered.

Wht kind of questions do you use? How difficult? Is there a list of Q&A's that are good to use?

I haven't had a single spam account get through after setting up my Q/A. The question I used:

Why did the _______ cross the road? (Backward spelling hint: nekcihc)

I would not put in something like 3 + 4 = ? because their bots may be able to crack that. But if you use a full sentence like that I don't see how a bot could actually crack that. They can't just brute force it either because that wouldn't be synced with the captcha cracking. Be sure to provide some variation with your acceptable answers though, such as with capital letters or even spelling errors.

Related threads in the past three days:

http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/371729-spammers/?hl=spam

Also, I assume you are not using this hook since they should be getting autobanned/flagged: http://community.invisionpower.com/files/file/5143-stop-spammer-registration/. With that hook however, you will still have a ton of dumb names trapped in the validation process, but not if you have a good Q/A.

Mathmatical QandA's are the absolute WORST. You need something that is specific to your demographic that only users you want to attact would know how to answer.

I have gotten very little to no spam in the past few months. After upgrading to 3.3 the spam pretty much stopped except for the spam that got bad in the reports before I turned that off to guests. I am also not even using the spam protection that is offered in the latest version.

Make you Q&As related to your forum.

All great tips - I deleted the questions with math questions and replaced with your chicken question. Added in a bunch of variation answers and will look forward to seeing the improvement.

Interested to see this post as we've had a huge increase in spam registrations in the last month too. We don't use a Q&A but how are the spammers getting past the captcha???

Interested to see this post as we've had a huge increase in spam registrations in the last month too. We don't use a Q&A but how are the spammers getting past the captcha???

Spammers can get past a captcha because no captcha is 100% effective. Also keep in mind some spammers employ actual humans to get by.

Has anyone else seen a large increase in registered spam accounts even with all of the spa settings in place? Even bogus looking emails are passing right through to 'member' level accounts and I don't understand how they are passing the question and answer challenge and captcha.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks,

We're getting 100s of spam registrations despite the reCaptch and Q&A being in place. The stop forum spam plugin (free) has knocked this on the head, so maybe give that a go?

The sudden influx and computer-generated email addresses scream "spambot", that's why I was surprised they got past the captcha. But Stop Forum Spam sounds interesting. I'll give it a go.

We're getting 100s of spam registrations despite the reCaptch and Q&A being in place.

Why aren't you changing your question?

I have three sites and there have been several spam epidemics in the past few years. Damn few have been able to register on any of my sites.

You have to have two types of spam prevention. One for bot spammers and one for human spammers; just one of the two will always fail.

For bots, I dropped Captcha and KeyCaptcha in favor of the Playthrough about a year ago. It is much easier than any frustrating captcha bot prevention, where you might have to refresh a dozen times to get a readable text

.

For human spammers I use the SFS spammer DB modification which stops known spammers for registering in the first place.

You MUST use bot AND human spam prevention to be successful. If there are two holes in your boat you can plug just one and expect it to float.