• 0

Help stopping bots posting warez and spam on a forum?


Question

Has anyone got any suggestions how I can stop bots filling certain sections of a forum with warez / spam?

Measures we have taken are:

  • When a user signs up there name, email and ip address are checked with the database on http://www.stopforumspam.com/
  • The user is also required to enter a reCaptcha word and answer a question such as "what would you put in a toaster?" when registering.

Despite this every few hours the forum will be hit with a wave a spam which will be continually posted until the user account is banned, example of this:

5z2tbwxwcf9i4r2iaa7s.jpg

Even after a user has been banned they can be seen on the active users list trying to create a new post, despite some of them been banned for the last 3 months... we think some bot is been used to post spam.

If its of any help we run vBulletin 3 and will be upgrading to version 4 this summer.

Any suggestions will be welcome, cheers :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

It's not a bot. It's probably a movie industry employee or most likely someone with the MPAA doing it as a way to catch IP addresses. They actually pay people to do that.

You could try banning the IP addresses they use.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I thought that I would post about how we managed to finally put an end to all the spam our forum was getting.

Over the last 12 months had tried many plugins and extensions, which to be honest were not that successful. However nothing has been as effective as the Keyword weight based spam detector for vBulletin.

This product scans any new posts from members who have less than 5 posts (can be changed to save cpu usage) it will look for user defiend keywords, such as hotfile.com.

Every time someone types a banned word in there post it counts as one point, when that post hits a certain number of points it will be denied.

As all the warez that get posted on our forum appear to be hosted hotfile.com, the word "hotfile.com" is now worth one point. The limit for denying a post is set to one point, so any post on the forum with the word "hotfile.com" is now rejected.

The spam bots on our forum never appear to post anything but warez hosted on hotfile.com, so this has pretty much been the end of our spam problems!

I cant believe the plugin has only had 127 downloads in almost two years, its by far one of the most useful plugins when it comes to stopping forum spam.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Except that I don't think it was spam bots posting. I think it is done manually but I could be wrong. Glad to see that you got your problem solved.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

A lot of times it's not bots but rather users that are paid to post on a forum for backlinks. I get users signing up on an IPB forum of mine that a.) pass captcha, b.) verify the email address (which are the only two requirements.) It's not that active so it's not a bother to me to manually check through.

But I notice on my stats (I have Mint setup on it) that 100% of the time they check their profiles (and posts) on a linkback checker (if you allow signatures and/or links for all users and not for those with x-amount of posts.) I've since changed the sig to require 5 posts and as far as posts itself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Was about to post that you could just ban the file-host names and it would stop the posts it but it seems you have already found that solution!

Its also good to add new measures every few months to keep them at bay ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

The reason I think it is generally bots posting spam is even after a user has been banned, that user will be seen on the active user list trying to post a new threads several times a day.

All a banned user can see when they log in is:

You have been banned for the following reason: Spamming the forum with Warez.

Date the ban will be lifted: Never

I would hope if the user was a human that person would get the message, yet i still see lots of banned users on the active list trying to post weeks after the ban was given.

jk9fq0eagvk0tnuo64jr.jpg

I'm sure we do also have actual people posting stuff too, i've seen somewhat legit looking posts with links to random websites in China trying to sell DS flashcards and iPhone rip offs.

Either way spam is not really a problem anymore, hopefully it will stay like that :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.