Can you please do something about the spam?

[magnify]

Is there anyway you can get someone to look into the fixing the forums so we don't get so much spam. I know its not a widely used forum, but its very annoying that every time I check the majority (if not all) of the messages are spam.

[Kevin]

Any suggestions? We have a captcha. Most of the spam comes from residential IPs and seems to be submitted manually after validating with the captcha and registering with a valid email address.

[JLeuze]

One option would be to make the forums private. They are really only for your customers anyways, so I don't think walling it off would hurt anything.

But actually implementing that might be hard. I know that with WordPress or Drupal, you can issue invitation codes. It would work well, if you could find a painless way to offer your customers an invite to the forum, or the whole site, it'd be great if it was all one CMS where you could login and comment on the forum, blog, or news.

[Justec]

They should be public for potential customers and google

Just need to limit EVERYTHING for new users.
No posting links
No Sigs
No Nothing!

[Kevin]

The thing is, the spammers can't post links or have sigs, but they still post garbage anyway. I could set up a period of time users have to be registered before they can post at all, but then people who register to ask a question would have to wait a few days.

Spammers don't come back generally after an initial verification, especially if they can't post on their first try, so that'd probably stop spam, but I hate to block all 0-day posting.

[Mike Bailey]

Kevin, How about using mod_security and ban commonly advertised products from being existent within $_POST strings?

[Kevin]

That doesn't seem to turn out to be the bulk of the spam. most is just "this is a very interesting post" and similar junk, or misencoded gibberish.

[Christian Patti]

There is a great mod to control spam registrations at vBulletin.org. It uses a number things to help eliminate spam registrations, one of the methods being checking how long it takes the user to register. As a bot will register very quickly and a real user will need time.

[ManagerJosh]

There is a great mod to control spam registrations at vBulletin.org. It uses a number things to help eliminate spam registrations, one of the methods being checking how long it takes the user to register. As a bot will register very quickly and a real user will need time.

No amount of spam control tools over at vBorg would help us here as all the spam being posted is done by a human. Even if we implemented the tools, a system could simply prompt for human intervention and then proceed to spam this board

[Mike Bailey]

We could moderate signups, if all else fails.