Damn Spammers

[LarryMonte]

If you have extended profile information, enable the "Favorite Quote" field.

A good portion of SpamBots will fill in "123456" in that field. Quite easy to spot with that showing.

We were able to trap that condition in a cronjob which auto-bans them. I think we've trapped about 5000 SpamBot attempts with that at this point.

Unfortunately, I didn't set this up so I'm not sure what would be involved.

[Ryan]

Ah, the beauty of stupid bots!

And the joys of SMF as it is too obscure for bot makers to bother attacking seriously :D

[LarryMonte]

Another give away...

A lot of bots use lame 48x48px avatars. Quite rustic and unprofessional looking.

[Dan Schulz]

Ah, the beauty of stupid bots!

And the joys of SMF as it is too obscure for bot makers to bother attacking seriously :D

Doesn't stop them on the forums I run.

[Ryan]

Doesn't stop them on the forums I run.

I've pretty much killed spam dead in it's tracks with SMF. I haven't had a spam registration in months and I haven't had an actual spam post make it's way onto my site in (I think) about a year.

If I turn off a bunch of anti-spam mods I use on my SMF1.1.x installation I'd become inundated though. However with SMF2 I'm just using the built in anti-spam installation and a 100% custom theme. I even allow guest posting on my SMF2 site and I haven't had a single spammer make their way past the defences since I launched the site in April 2008.

SMF2 has some pretty funky anti-spam stuff under the hood though, so I'm not surprised that it's good at blocking them. Plus it's even more obscure than SMF1.1.x since it's still in the RC stage so very few bot makers would be targetting it yet.



I was getting hundreds of spam posts per day when running one of my sites on phpBB2, but on changing it to SMF1.1.x back in early 2007 I've killed the spam quite nicely. That site has had a few posts made by bots (maybe about 5 or 6 in total), but there were quite a few registrations which made their way through so I've had to up the anti-spam features quite a bit to fully block them out. The Forum Stop Spam mod has been one of the most effective for stopping the bot registrations. I've tried Akismet, but the SMF implementation of really sucks and I don't recommend it (the vBulletin is apparently a lot better).

[Cais]

I admin an SMF forum as well, and to be quite honest I do not remember the last "spammer" registration and the forums just turned two years old at the beginning of the month.

It's a niche subject matter, and only PR2, so that probably helps some but I found SMF to be quite good at anti-spamming on its own, before we went to admin approval registrations, but that was due to another issue altogether.

[Jeffro]

Ok, I've changed things once again. Here is the new system.

Still using Q&A but this time, there is only one question and one answer. So it's easy for legitimate users. This is a required field.

However, I have added a non required field which asks the question, Why Should I Activate Your Account? If they don't provide an answer or I think the answer is spammy in nature, I delete the registration.

The problem with moderating new registrations for me right now is that I have no way to tell the difference visually between a legitimate user and a spammer. The only info I have to go by is IP address, email, username, and referrer. I had deleted a few legitimate users which I thought was spam so this new non required field will help me distinguish between the two.