How to deal with spammers?

[David N.]

So everyday I get about 3 dozens new accounts flagged for admin approval because the spam defense returned a score 4. 

How do you deal with these? 

So far I've been checking the emails in the stopforumspam.com database and the IPs in the cleantalk.org database and if one of those returns that the account is a spammer, is it better to ban or delete the account? I'm worried that with banning I'll quickly end up with 10s of thousands of banned accounts in my database. 

Meanwhile if I catch someone actually posting a spammy link I just "Flas as a spammer" on their profile. 

I'm not sure I fully grasp which one of those three choices I should pick?

1. Ban
2. Delete
3. Flag as spammer 

[Randy Calvert]

Flag as Spammer bans the member AND deletes ANY content posted by them (posts, statuses, etc).

In terms of spammers...  the new version of IPB in beta supports hCAPTCHA, which should hopefully reduce bad registrations.  Also take a look at the CleanTalk plugin as it's made a big difference in both registrations and contact us form spam.  

[Jim M]

59 minutes ago, Jamynee said:

So everyday I get about 3 dozens new accounts flagged for admin approval because the spam defense returned a score 4. 

How do you deal with these?

Simple answer is don’t allow the score 4 results register as per the default setting in ACP > Members > Spam Prevention > Spam Defense.

If you want to review these per your own reasons, any further action would also need to follow your desired plan. I think you’re idea of having a lot of banned accounts would be my personal concern and the above would resolve that.

Just now, Randy Calvert said:

Flag as Spammer bans the member AND deletes ANY content posted by them (posts, statuses, etc).

Just a small addendum, it can do those things but all per the proper settings in ACP > Members > Spam Prevention 🙂 

[CheersnGears]

20 minutes ago, Jim M said:

Simple answer is don’t allow the score 4 results register as per the default setting in ACP > Members > Spam Prevention > Spam Defense.

If you want to review these per your own reasons, any further action would also need to follow your desired plan. I think you’re idea of having a lot of banned accounts would be my personal concern and the above would resolve that.

Just a small addendum, it can do those things but all per the proper settings in ACP > Members > Spam Prevention 🙂 

Question about this... over time, that builds up a significant amount of spam accounts in our database. Is there a recommended way to prune those out after a set amount of time.  My site is 21 years old in August, I'm sure there is a lot of dead weight in there from over the years.

And a weird trait of a bunch of my spammers... they followed my profile, so even though they are marked spam, they still show in my profile as followers.  Furthermore, those profiles are still visible to the public even after they're banned.

[Jim M]

16 minutes ago, CheersnGears said:

Question about this... over time, that builds up a significant amount of spam accounts in our database. Is there a recommended way to prune those out after a set amount of time.  My site is 21 years old in August, I'm sure there is a lot of dead weight in there from over the years.

Neither option I suggested recommended leaving them in your system 🙂 

1. If they are a level 4 spammer, don’t allow them to register. 
2. I would recommend ensuring the delete content and member option is enabled for Flagging as a Spammer so you have a 1 click solution to removing them and their content if they get through the spam defense system on lower levels. (Just ensure you and your trusted staff only have access)

If you have previous spammers in your community, you can delete them using the member prune tool available when searching the member list in the ACP. Just ensure you click the “Spammers” tab before pruning found results 😉 

[David N.]

On 6/2/2022 at 2:29 AM, Jim M said:

Simple answer is don’t allow the score 4 results register as per the default setting in ACP > Members > Spam Prevention > Spam Defense.

Problem is, I've had legit users try to register that were flagged as spam defense score 4, so if I had not approved them manually or if I had not allowed them to register they couldn't have joined the community. 😬

[Marc Stridgen]

Unfortunately there is little other advice I can give other than these. Spam will always be a balancing act between ensuring they dont get in, and ensuring your members do. We do have hcaptcha being introduced in the next release, which appears to be better at reducing this

[SurvivalServers]

I don't think the question and answer challenge is actually working, it seems people are still registering and spamming despite that. Also all of the spammers from today are "Level 1"

We are daily targeted with 20-30 spam accounts/posts and we have to have our staff spending hours every day just cleaning up. Really wish this was top priority.

I forgot to add we had virtually no issues up until a week ago. I think there's a vulnerability/new leak of some sort you guys really need to look into more deeply.

Edited June 9, 2022 by SurvivalServers

[Mark H]

A couple things to consider:

The registrants are human, not bots. (They then turn the account over to a spambot.)

If you do not regularly and frequently change your Q&A's they only have to look up the answers using Google search.

They use "new" email addresses which are not in the spam databases yet.

As my colleague noted, hcaptcha is being introduced in the next release, which appears to be better at reducing this overall.

[Randy Calvert]

If spam is really causing problems, take a look at the CleanTalk plugin. It’s helped reduce spam tremendously for my community. Some obviously still gets through, but it’s lowered the amount by around 80 percent. 

[SurvivalServers]

I was convinced the Question and Answer challenge was not working so I did an actual test (hint: I was wrong) We have an existing question and kept changing it. Then I realized spam was still bad so I did a test (from my post yesterday) and put random, non-brute forceable answers for the question I had. 

Flash forward today and we have 10 new spam accounts and 1 real account. Went to the registration page and saw there was a "Sign in with Google" still. All of the new accounts (10 spammers, 1 real) were gmail accounts.

The problem is actually "Sign in With Google" and spammers utilizing that to bypass any security measures. We've disabled it now and will see how spam decreases but this really needs to be addressed by IP Board.

Also is there a way to change the registration URL? That would be another way to address spam.

Edited June 10, 2022 by SurvivalServers

[Jim M]

6 minutes ago, SurvivalServers said:

Flash forward today and we have 10 new spam accounts and 1 real account. Went to the registration page and saw there was a "Sign in with Google" still. All of the new accounts (10 spammers, 1 real) were gmail accounts.

The problem is actually "Sign in With Google" and spammers utilizing that to bypass any security measures. We've disabled it now and will see how spam decreases but this really needs to be addressed by IP Board.

Correct. The social logins, I believe, due to their TOS, need to bypass these and always have.

6 minutes ago, SurvivalServers said:

Also is there a way to change the registration URL? That would be another way to address spam.

You could via the FURL system but please be aware that it is outside our scope of support (i.e. if you have an issue with a customized FURL, we'll have you revert it back). You can find it in ACP -> System -> Advanced Configuration -> Friendly URLs

[JohnCourt]

On 6/9/2022 at 2:09 PM, Randy Calvert said:

If spam is really causing problems, take a look at the CleanTalk plugin. It’s helped reduce spam tremendously for my community. Some obviously still gets through, but it’s lowered the amount by around 80 percent. 

I did a search for CleanTalk plugin and returned zero, is it hiding somewhere?

Well, I found it, it's by user CleanTalk, called AntiSpam, but only reliable up to V 4.4 

 

[Marc Stridgen]

I would suggest switching to hcaptcha in the latest release first of all. This is one of the main things on cleantalk, but was added to core on 4.7

[Jon Matcho]

On 6/1/2022 at 9:29 PM, Jim M said:

2. I would recommend ensuring the delete content and member option is enabled for Flagging as a Spammer so you have a 1 click solution to removing them and their content if they get through the spam defense system on lower levels. (Just ensure you and your trusted staff only have access)

If you have previous spammers in your community, you can delete them using the member prune tool available when searching the member list in the ACP. Just ensure you click the “Spammers” tab before pruning found results 😉 

Not sure if it matters that I'm running Community in the Cloud, but...

There is no delete content AND member option. The content can be auto-deleted, but the member only banned.

Which leads to the next issue: There is no "prune tool" that I can find. I have to manually delete Spammers and have hundreds of non-flagged spammers stuck in the Validating status. How do I delete these in bulk?

[Marc Stridgen]

I think you may be misunderstanding the option there. The option when you flag a member as spam would be set to perform that action. Please see the following guide on this

https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/how-to-use-ips-community-suite/managing-members/spam-prevention-r9/

With regard the items there, those are actually validating members. There are no way in which to mass action those. They each need to be validated or deleted.