Damn Spammers

[Jeffro]

Akismet is already in use on the forum, I just had to fine tune it.

[Len]

Of course spammers can usually just access the site from another IP address, but this should at least help.

Yeah, especially considering many if not most people have dynamic IPs these days. Then there is the problem of proxies. But as you say it should help somewhat.

[Jeffro]

Sorry for the delay in cleaning up the place over the past week but it's done now. If it were not for Akismet moderating most of these spam posts/threads, you'd be seeing more garbage on the forum.

[Jeffro]

Ok so I've made a few more changes. For awhile now, new registrations have undergone moderation where a user doesn't become fully registered until I approve them. This has helped to cut down automated spam from showing up on the forum. However, some of the usernames I have approved have turned out to be spammers. It's hard for me to know who is a spammer and who is not because the registration page for the forum didn't provide fields to fill out which are tied to their user profile. So now, I've added three more required fields which are normally found in a users profile and have made them required. I have also added a fourth required field which asks the question if they are a spammer or not, just for giggles. I'm going to see how these changes work out.

[JLeuze]

I have also added a fourth required field which asks the question if they are a spammer or not, just for giggles.

I noticed that, wasn't sure if it was a trick question or not

[Ryan]

Are you still moderating registrations? I'm not convinced that is a good idea. I generally don't bother registering for forums which require manual registration.

[Cais]

It's a hard trade-off, but I find that using manual intervention, as in only approving new members via forum staff actually "checking the box", does reduce membership registrations but in most cases also means the new member actually wants to be involved in the community.

[Jeffro]

Well, the required fields didn't work out as I thought because there is no option to have them be required only on the registration page. I've since turned them off.

I don't know how many options I have left besides manual registration approval and simply turning registration on the forum off and registering people myself. If I turn off manual registration, I could wake up one day and see 10 spammers who have registered and published stuff all over the forum. Quite frankly, I don't want to babysit the forum to make sure that doesn't happen. At least registration approval prevents that from happening.

I will have to investigate the spam issue further. Who knows, maybe there is a mod for the forum that I can use that sends out invitation codes which act as a key for those interested in registering an account. But really, between automated spammers and human spammers, I have no idea on how to combat both. Turning registration off is the only way and even then, if the human spammer is dumb/desperate enough to send in information that looks legit, it could trick me into registering the account for them.

[Len]

It's a never ending battle indeed. I'm a moderator at BloggerForum.com and combatting spam was a MAJOR battle. We ended up closing shop for awhile so the owner could investigate new anti-spam measures.

[Dan Schulz]

Since most of the spammers are likely just bots, have you thought about employing a honeybot trap? Simply use a hidden form field that only a spammer will see. If there's a message teling real people NOT to fill the form in, it should work a lot better than what you currently have.