Drowning in spam

[Benjamin Schuster]

Hello community,

for the past months my small forum at www.specializedforum.de has been flooded with spam. I tried many different things. All of the captcha options, flagging spammers, looking at the geolocation (which doesn´t help as their IPs are from allover the globe randomly). I renewed and updated to the latest version of IPB but it has helped nothing.

Right now I am using hcaptcha, Q&A option and IPS spam prevention enabled.

There has always been some sort of spam in my IP boards over the years, but this is absolutely out of control.

I do not want to manually activate registrations, as I do not have the time to do that for 6 forums everyday.

Any ideas on how to get rid of this issue?

[Jim M]

How long have you had your Question & Answers in place for? You may wish to try and rotate those and making them a little more challenging that only your niche would know and they aren't easily Googled.

If your community does not serve a specific region of the world, i.e. if you're an American based community, you can block China/Russia/India, the big spamming countries without losing your audience.

Ultimately, outside of flagging these spammers when they come through, you have deployed all spam prevention settings in the software so it is just a matter of fine tuning them to allow your audience through but block out spammers. Keep in mind that no spam prevention technique is 100% effective and a replacement for moderators.

[Benjamin Schuster]

I changed the Q&A around and will also ban the regions you mentioned. Will report back if that fails. Thanks.