HORRENDOUS SPAM PROBLEMS!!

[AL B]

I've use IPB for years (nearly 20!).

We get insane amounts of spam now. I spent hours marking users as spammers but their content no longer gets deleted. Beyond frustrating. My community is a waste of time now. Is there a way to delete posts made by spammers in bulk?

[Marc]

Unfortuanetly there is a very large increase in spam lately across the board. What you can do however is to ensure you are doing the following

1. Ensure you are using hCaptcha, rather than any other captcha type.  This seems to be the most effective at present
2. Ensure you have increase the sensitivity when you set up an hCaptcha account
3. Ensure you have question and answers set up, as you dont seem to have at present

You can see more about this, and how to use the "Mark as spam" function, which will allow you to delete all the posts from a person at once if needed, in the following guide

 

[AL B]

Thank you.

[sadams101]

Is the spam issue from registered users who are spamming via the PM system to other registered users? Is it spam via the Contact Us form? Sorry, but could you please clarify?

[Gabriel Torres]

@AL B

 

Also, try:

It works great here for us.

[Arthmoor]

 

[Marc]

6 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

 

We have some new spam defence measures being actively worked on at present. 

[HighlanderICT]

We got absolutely slammed over the last 12-15hrs. Normally we get 0-1 spam registrations per day as we have all the typical measures in place - captcha, registration questions, email validation etc. In the last 12-15 hours we have had more than 50.

The Spam Defense system also helps but our license expired last week and I had not renewed it so registrations did not go through there (my bad), but all other measures were still in place. Last night we had about 35 registrations, all spammers, and all got through. They posted with merry abandon! My mods flagged them as spammers in a game of cyber whack-a-mole.

I renewed my license this morning to get the Spam Defense working again and also tweaked it so that registrations require admin validation now until this (hopefully) dies down. Since I did this, have seen another 15 or so registrations. Spam defense caught 3 of them. 2 with a score of 4, the other with a score of 3. I flagged them as spammers which hopefully adds them to Spam Defense? My concern however is that the StopForumSpam site which I used to check the rest shows some combination of username, email address or IP address, and in some cases all three values for each of the others so how could Spam Defense rate these as 1 when they are already blacklisted?    

[CheersnGears]

I highly recommend the @CleanTalk plug-in.

[HighlanderICT]

another dozen registrations overnight. all had either not responded to validation email or needed admin validation. flagged them all. 

Installed the plugin from @CleanTalk and set it up, registered for free trial and within 5 minutes it blocked its first registration attempt. Will see how it helps me during free trial. At $12 per year it seems value for money if it does what it says on the tin.  

[CheersnGears]

2 hours ago, HighlanderICT said:

another dozen registrations overnight. all had either not responded to validation email or needed admin validation. flagged them all. 

Installed the plugin from @CleanTalk and set it up, registered for free trial and within 5 minutes it blocked its first registration attempt. Will see how it helps me during free trial. At $12 per year it seems value for money if it does what it says on the tin.  

If you haven't already, in your CleanTalk account, set a block on countries that are unlikely to be visiting your site, plus Russia and China.  Of those that remain, you'll start to see a pattern of blocks in CleanTalk from other countries as well and you can zap those too.

[HighlanderICT]

We were getting hammered first day by a group of IPs in Delhi so i blocked those and today it was Russia so blocked those too. Its a website for a Scottish football team so not really visited a lot from outside of 5 or 6 countries.

[opentype]

On 7/17/2023 at 10:05 PM, HighlanderICT said:

we have all the typical measures in place - captcha, registration questions, email validation etc.

I am missing “moderate first X posts” from the group settings. That’s the best measure. If the posts never get published, they will try and give up quickly. If you let them post freely, you invite them to hammer your site with spam. 

[hawksfan]

I've been looking for a solution to this because it's absolutely blown up on our site over the past 4 days. And almost all of it is coming from inside the U.S. with scores of 1. I've installed hCaptcha and I'm not sure it's really helping.

We've always run with email validation, but right now I've added manual admin approval on top of that. This is a pain though, because sometime's it's not obvious whether it's a spam account or not. So one thing that I'm considering (and this speaks to @opentype's request of moderating their initial posts) is in the spam prevention settings, bumping the action for a score of 1 up to "allow registration, but require moderation approval of all posts". I think we're going to try that out and remove the manual admin approval.

[Marc]

On 7/22/2023 at 11:46 PM, hawksfan said:

I've been looking for a solution to this because it's absolutely blown up on our site over the past 4 days. And almost all of it is coming from inside the U.S. with scores of 1. I've installed hCaptcha and I'm not sure it's really helping.

We've always run with email validation, but right now I've added manual admin approval on top of that. This is a pain though, because sometime's it's not obvious whether it's a spam account or not. So one thing that I'm considering (and this speaks to @opentype's request of moderating their initial posts) is in the spam prevention settings, bumping the action for a score of 1 up to "allow registration, but require moderation approval of all posts". I think we're going to try that out and remove the manual admin approval.

🙂 

 

[HighlanderICT]

On 7/17/2023 at 4:08 PM, CheersnGears said:

I highly recommend the @CleanTalk plug-in.

I installed this plugin in the timeline shown above when we were getting absolutely slammed, and almost immediately our registrations and visits dropped to 0. These are my stats for the 7-day free trial and just purchased the 2-year subscription with 6 months free so about USD$22 for 2.5 years. (...And another 6 months for writing an honest review!) 

Edited July 24, 2023 by HighlanderICT

[hawksfan]

On 7/24/2023 at 12:35 AM, Marc Stridgen said:

🙂 

 

Yeah I saw your note on this earlier in the thread. Any idea on a timeline? Sooner than later I hope.

For now I discovered that I didn't have the hCaptcha setting properly dialed up, so I went to 11 with it and it seems like that has worked for now. How long it will last, no idea. I suspect that the explosion in the of use of OpenAI is at play here and that we may be fighting an uphill battle. 

Edited July 25, 2023 by hawksfan

[Marc]

13 hours ago, hawksfan said:

Yeah I saw your note on this earlier in the thread. Any idea on a timeline? Sooner than later I hope.

It's not something I can give specific dates on at present, unfortunately. However, its something we are actively working on.

[MacrossWorld]

Wanted to chime in and say we too were hit with 30+ registrations this week who spammed hundreds of posts, which required a lot of manual cleanup.

Definitely look forward to anything for Invision can provide to help us out, the interest is there

Thank you!

 

[Emediate]

Does flagging a spammer also remove all the PMs they may have sent?

[Randy Calvert]

3 hours ago, Emediate said:

Does flagging a spammer also remove all the PMs they may have sent?

Yes, it removes PMs, profiles, posts, gallery content, files, etc.

It’s like they never existed.