How can I stop forum spam bots?

Light Level 1

December 3, 2011, 9:35 am

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How can I stop forum spam bots?

I run a fairly large forum which seems to get a lot of spam bots joining simply to post a few advertisements. I have an image verification and email activation system in place, but some bots seem to be able to beat this. Is there any way of stopping forum spam bots like this?

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Light

Light

True, but I feel that may be awkward for some members (in case they don't have sound). It's a good suggestion though, thanks.

13 years ago

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seoguy

seoguy

security question i think will solve the issue. I dohave a forum too and the only thing that I have during registration is the image verification but since adding security question, spams simply give up.

13 years ago

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Cristian

Cristian

You can install CAPTCHA and some sort of spam protection for every time someone wants to post. But this will turn off any real active people on the forum. The best thing to do is to manual moderate every post. Hire or recruit some moderators if you can't do it yourself.

13 years ago

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fizzer

fizzer

You can try Captcha or if that won't work then you have to hire a moderator who has to be active in removing all those spam posts..!

13 years ago

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Beverly

Beverly

PeopleSign (plug in for forums) saved my forum from spammer. Before Peoplesign i was getting up to 20 spam sign ups a day. They would come, sign up, post their link and leave. Of course, the sign up was accomplished automatically via a software or bot. But it took me hours to clean up these spam profiles as most linked to illegal sites.

After installing PeopleSign, i rarely see a spam sign up or illegal link on a profile.

To test it out, i turned PeopleSign off for half an hour and got 3 spam sign ups immediately. I turned it back on very quickly to spare myself the headache.

13 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

If captcha is not very effective in your forum against bots, you have to do it manually. In the forum of my husband’s office website, they catch the bots and ban the IP. It is big work doing it manually but what they do is to make it a sort of a game that the moderators keep count of their catch. When the IP is banned, the bots will naturally use another IP. However, there will come a time that the bots will run out of IP address and that’s the end of their annoyance.

6 years ago

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