Spam Defense info

[Squad Games]

Hello, recently we received a report about a user being unable to register on our forums, this user was getting a 2S129/1 error when he was trying to register. I took a look at the Spam Defense Logs and found out that he was being flagged as a known spammer (Level 4) on the Spam Defense service, this guy swears that he is not a spammer and that it was a mistake on our side. Anyway, after that we were wondering if we could get a little more info about how the Spam Defense system works, I suppose it uses IP and email addresses from flagged users on the different sites running Invision's software, but for instance how does it handles a partial match for an email address? or maybe a legit user using a previously flagged IP address?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Edited August 7, 2020 by Squad Games
typo

[bfarber]

We do not publicly disclose how spammers are identified because it would only give those who wish to circumvent the protections more information as to how to go about it.

We use information from many sources (Stop Forum Spam, SBL, etc.) as well as Invision Community installations that report back to the spam service to devise a score that represents the probability the user is a spammer. As with any system, there can be false positives. You can either work with the user to register their account (i.e. manually from the AdminCP to "pre-register" the account for them), or you can submit a ticket and we can take a look on our end and make a determination as to whether or not to remove the block against the user. Unfortunately, however, we can't really get into "how it works" outside of that.