I am still new to IPS and not even certain that this is the area to post suggestions, though that is what I have seemingly been doing for the past few weeks.

Seems like we are getting a lot of spam these days.

From a phone call we had with the IPS team we were told that the spam filter in place is supposed to recognize common spam signups.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be doing a great job. We are removing small handfuls of spam every day.

Is there a better spam filter that you guys feel does a better job than the standard one that IPS has in place?

Thank you in advance.

Ronald .............download Stop Spammer Registration here

It's not necessarily that IPS's spam service is bad, it does it's job quite well. It's just that new waves of spam are not in the database yet.

Instead of deleting the users straight away, flag them as spammers. This improves the IPS spam service. By deleting them before flagging them you are not giving the spam service new spammer credentials.

SSR as linked above is best at stopping the latest spam that has not made it into the IPS Spam DB.

Foodie,

Want to thank you for your recommendation of STOP SPAMMER REGISTRATION.

Within moments of installing the plug-in yesterday afternoon, we were barraged with notifications of spambots hitting our forum. We were getting a dozen attempted spam registrations in a span of 10 minutes.

The plug-in works beautifully, and if not for foodie pointing it out, would never have known about it.

Far better than IPS's spam service. Yes, we handled all the spam registrations correctly (as per Spam Happy's post), but unfortunately, it proved to be very little defense for the problem.

Update...

We are still having basically the same spam problems as before.

Members signing up, daily, posting messages that contain links to illegal software.

No matter how many times we flag these spammers, it doesn't seem as if IPS is learning anything and stopping future registrations.

BTW, this is the method of which we are taking care of spammers in case we are doing something wrong...

Hover the mouse over the username. A box appears with their username and stats. Within that box, at the bottom, is a button called FLAG SPAMMER. We simply click that option and it deletes the post and prevents user from posting further.

Should we be using another method?

Make sure in the ACP settings that your spam service settings are configured to report the markings to us. If it's not, then our service is not notified when you flag a use as a spammer.

Beyond that, however, one user flagging a registering user as a spammer does not directly update our service to block that user in the future. This would be prone to abuse. Our service learns over time as users are flagged as a spammer on multiple sites.

I run a medium large forum. We get zero spam. Things we do:

Spam monitoring service - configured to deny registration

stopforumspam.com mod - configured to deny registration if IP and or email address appears in their database

keycaptcha rather than the default Recaptcha

Email validation required

Strict rules on member names - spam looking names should they get through the above are deleted

We don't bother now with the question and answer challenge. Keycaptcha prevents bots signing up accounts.

I'd be very interested to look at your site if you're genuinely having multiple spammers per day when using the IPS Spam Monitoring Service.

If you submit a support ticket and ask for it to be sent to me (mention that I asked you to do so), I'll take a look and see if there's anything we can improve.

Thank you to bfarber and 3DKiwi for the assistance.

Mark, I also greatly appreciate your offer for help. I have submitted a ticket this morning with support services. You will know it is mine because it mentions your name and this thread.

Thank You.

I find the spam service quite good, much better then other forum software, and it's blocked all spam accounts on my forum so far. So hopefully you can sort this out and hopefully update the IPS Spam filter with these new spammers to avoid any headaches for other forums ;)

Every now and then spammers find new ways around the blocks so it's good to get info from someone having trouble so we can put in new rules to catch them :)

Really hoping that someone at IPS discovers a hole in our system that we only need to patch up.

We just had someone come to our forum tonight, going on a little spree and posting drug ads in in several different threads.

Really hoping that someone at IPS discovers a hole in our system that we only need to patch up.

We just had someone come to our forum tonight, going on a little spree and posting drug ads in in several different threads.

Maybe you could enforce some restrictions to newly registered members until this could be sorted?

Members > 0 posts > moderated posts > till 'x' posts.