Guests search box spam

[nodle]

Has anyone else noticed tons of Chinese searches on your forums. I know that in ACP under Statistics>Searches there are just tons of Chinese spam lookups. About the only way I see to combat this is to disable the search module for guests, but then they can't use the tags function. Does anyone else run into this or have a solution. It would be nice to see invisible captcha or something similar for guests when using search.  

[Marc]

The only way to stop people from adding any search would indeed be to disable the search. There isnt really any way around that. What you could do however is to ensure you have a reasonable flood control enforced. That way it really shouldnt matter

[nodle]

4 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

The only way to stop people from adding any search would indeed be to disable the search. There isnt really any way around that. What you could do however is to ensure you have a reasonable flood control enforced. That way it really shouldnt matter

Thanks @Marc Stridgen. Flood control isn't an issue, it's just so many spam entries that it's really hard to tell what people are searching for through all the spam. A suggestion for a future update would be an option to enable the captcha option in the ACP to apply to the search function.

[Randy Calvert]

I use Cloudflare's WAF and created a rule to block traffic from Russia and China as a good amount of the junk traffic we received from there.  (We don't have any real legitimate traffic from there.)

It might be worth considering blocking those areas higher up in the stack either in .htaccess, in your firewall, etc.  

By the way...  if you use .htaccess, you won't be able to just list a country, but there are some good resources that will let you pick a country and it will give you the IP ranges and generate the .htaccess code for you to block the IPs used in those countries.  

Check out:

https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php

[Jim M]

3 hours ago, nodle said:

Thanks @Marc Stridgen. Flood control isn't an issue, it's just so many spam entries that it's really hard to tell what people are searching for through all the spam. A suggestion for a future update would be an option to enable the captcha option in the ACP to apply to the search function.

Just out of my own curiosity, is this something that has just come to light or something you've been dealing with for a while? There may be solutions like @Randy Calvert said with blocking requests from countries you don't service up the server/network chain.

I've also moved this to our Feature Suggestion forum so we can get this considered for feedback.

[nodle]

1 hour ago, Jim M said:

just out of my own curiosity, is this something that has just come to light or something you've been dealing with for a while?

No I only recently converted over from Xenforo about 3 weeks ago and started to notice it. I did disable the search module for members only which worked, but when viewing as a guest your not able to click on tags since they must rely on the search function to work properly. So I had to re-enable, which in return brought back the spam searches.