SPAM

[David Tingen]

I am having a lot of spam on my board. I already installed hCaptcha, but spam is still being created. Please help!

[TDBF]

15 minutes ago, David Tingen said:

I am having a lot of spam on my board. I already installed hCaptcha, but spam is still being created. Please help!

One of the ways I handle spam posts is to set the first post to moderate.

Go to your ACP, then Member groups, click on members and then the Content tab. Set 'Remove content moderation' to 1 and 'Approve items of content (posts, comments, etc)'.

While it may be a bit more work, at least this keeps the spammers posts off your forum, and you can just hit the spammers icon to get rid of them at your leisure.

I have been using this method for about 4 years and I get virtually no spam on my forum.

[Jim M]

Would advise also increasing the difficulty of the CAPTCHA in your hCAPTCHA settings. This has helped others. Also, may wish to rotate your questions in Q/A on registration. Keep in mind that there are human spammers too so keeping the questions unique to your niche and not easily Google-able would be advised.

[wegorz23]

We fixed it by installing Cleantalk. Really helped. 

 

[VaBeach_Guy]

We aren't getting spam posts, but we are getting A LOT of registrations that, if approved, would lead to spam posts. 

We're using Invisible reCAPTCHA, would one of the other options be better than that one?

[Clover13]

I've been getting hit pretty hard the last couple weeks on one of my sites.  I have two sites on the same host with the same setup, yet only one is getting hit.  The spammers are either pretty good multi-step bots or human, as they have to get through email validation and then post to get access to PMs.  But their posts are garbage airline ads, so they quickly get banned.  It's bad enough I've had to put admin approval on accounts for now.

[Jim M]

17 hours ago, VaBeach_Guy said:

We're using Invisible reCAPTCHA, would one of the other options be better than that one?

Yes, many of our clients have had success with hCAPTCHA. You can increase the "Passing Threshold" in hCAPTCHA to "Difficult" and this will also make it harder to pass for bots.

[VaBeach_Guy]

On 5/13/2023 at 9:15 AM, Jim M said:

Yes, many of our clients have had success with hCAPTCHA. You can increase the "Passing Threshold" in hCAPTCHA to "Difficult" and this will also make it harder to pass for bots.

So far, so good. Since switching, there's been zero fake registrations whereas before that, there were dozens (or more) per day.