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stevehal 
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Joined: 07 December 2003
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 Topic: Idea to stop forum spamming...
Posted: 09 June 2011 at 12:50pm |
Hi,
We are sometimes flodded with spams, like 8 different new threads or replies, which all have to be manually deleted. These trace back to obvious out of country businesses that have a person manually create new accounts, and either create new threads or add replies.
A simple feature to at least slow down on this would be a "Wait to allow forum posts on new registrations" option.
If enabled, you would enter the number of minutes a new account has to be created before allowing a post by the person who created the account. Even a wait of 15 minutes may deter some of those "workroom" type posts. You could just do a simple DateDiff function if enabled!
Again, just an idea...
One more idea is the ability to delete all posts by a user. This way instead of doing a search, and manually deleting each message, it could be done in one step. This allows us to keep a suspended account so it cannot be used again.
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WebWiz-Bruce
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Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
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Posted: 09 June 2011 at 1:53pm |
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If you have a look at the activation time and the time of the first post many of these spam posts are done hours or days after the registration as these people employed to spam forums tend to activate accounts then go back later to do the actual spamming.
One of the best ways to stop spam which is similar to what you suggest is have a starting group of under 10 posts where post approval is enabled. This means that new members will require their posts approved till they get to 10 posts. Using this system we find that most spammers only post 1 or 2 posts and then give up as they know they are wasting their time.
Version 10 adds a spam filter which allows posts to be rejected of require approval when spam words are used in a post. We find this has more or less eliminated all spam in this forums since introduced.
Version 10 also adds options to disable links, images, and Private Messages on a group biases so that new members are not able to do any of these till they reach 10 posts, this also seems to greatly reduce spam.
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billd3
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Joined: 19 February 2003
Location: United States
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Posted: 09 June 2011 at 2:16pm |
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Here is how many of the forum spammers typically work on our forum:
Spammer joins.
May wait to activate, some don't
They post a message that almost makes sense - sort of fits, then they leave.
They come back a week or several days later, edit their original messages and add links and ads - after we've stopped paying attention and have assumed they are "ok".
Some join, activate, post messages, and leave. All within an hour.
We don't have a lot of trouble because of of our mods is a bloodhound - suspicious names cause him to check IP addresses. He often has them suspended and IP blocked before their first post is finished.
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BillD
http://theamcpages.com
http://theamcforum.com
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stevehal
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Posted: 09 June 2011 at 2:32pm |
Our forum users are also "bloodhounds" as you say. In many cases it is only takes a few minutes until I get a report of a spam post. But it is still terribly frustrating.
If they wait a week then come back, then yes, there is little we can do.
A batch delete posts by a user member would be good if that could be added.
Also, maybe the spam filter introduced recently will work... and maybe at some point a database could be shared for known spam words.
Also, the group idea for members with less than 10 posts seems reasonable!
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WebWiz-Bruce
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Posted: 09 June 2011 at 5:16pm |
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The spam filer would be different for different forums.
For example for some reason we seem to have lots of spam posts on golf
clubs and shoes so both these are in the spam filter and if you have
these words in your posts then the post will need approving.
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dunga
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Joined: 01 October 2008
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Posted: 12 August 2011 at 3:07pm |
 WebWiz-Bruce wrote:
Version 10 also adds options to disable links, images, and Private Messages on a group biases so that new members are not able to do any of these till they reach 10 posts, this also seems to greatly reduce spam. |
So I assume that this is not possible in v8.05. Would it be possible to disable links to all members? Or if need be, the entire Web Wiz Rich Text Editor (who needs Emoticons anyway). Seems to me that if you limit linking you will greatly reduce spamming and low level advertising. Many forum members don't use this feature and the site's very casual moderation is appreciated. Why battle spam when it might be possible to prevent it. Thanks for any ideas on this ... yeah, I know ... Upgrade.
Edited by dunga - 13 August 2011 at 4:57am
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fooladi
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Posted: 12 August 2011 at 4:17pm |
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is it possible separate links from posts as footnotes which need approving by moderators?
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wildcat dude
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Posted: 10 September 2011 at 2:50am |
What worked for us, is this feature.
Administrator Member Activation
New members will not be able to use their account till the admin activates their membership. An activation email will be sent to the forum email address entered above.
We then get an email of any new user that registers. I have my email account setup to alert me via a text message and I have rules in place that copies the email to a shared folder so my other admins/moderators can review. So any one of them can verified and cross check. We verify IP's first (don't allow China, Russia or other hot spamming/hacking countries or known IP's), then we check email addresses and userid's. Interesting stuff you can find out if you're presistent. That has dropped our spam to 0. I know eventually we might let somebody in we don't want, but compared to the way it was before, our life is GRAND!  I've even got rid of the Suspended User Account - don't need it (we used it before to quickly identify spammers, it was useless to delete their account).
Too bad the ban IP addresses is useless (even the global filter for banning email addresses don't work) and I don't have access to the routers, or I'd stop them before they reached the forum. Working with our web admin now to implement the spider.txt so we can block the bad spiders.
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