Getting rid of forum spammers and crippling them too

[webado]

Here's an interesting article dealing with all forms of spam and how to deal with it. http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=684

Obviously hardened spammers are totally non-plussed by the threat of prosecution, though it is on the surface at least very powerful: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...tfg,tfg,00.asp . If we have to wait for law enforcement to act, we'll be buried in the crap though

It will be of interest to everybody who's had it up to their gills with spam and all manner of garbage that's posted in forums, guestbooks, blogs as well as referrer spam. One needs to use a full arsenal to fight this, and we must be relentless and merciless.

Of particular note is the discussion on "silent spam", which is what's happening in forums: spammers signing up for the sole purpose of posting their website link in their profile. If the member list is available for viewing to non-signed-in visitors (like bots and spiders), presto, the spammer's website url's appearing in their profiles become valuable back links to their sites they want to promote, without lifting a finger and without posting anything.

Based on this, several things can and should be done, and the sooner, the better:
1) Delete all members with no posts and who signed up more than say 1 week ago. What's the point of signing up ?

2) Disable the member list altogether or at least for non signed-up visitors. This will keep it out of the bots' path, so it won't get spidered and spammers' interests will be thwarted.

3) Alternately the memberlist can be modified (either through forum control settings or a bit of scripting) to not show any member with 0 posts or less than some set number of posts to be decided. Then it's no longer advantageous for spammers to sign-up.

4) Use the robots.txt file to block bots from accessing the member list, in this forum it would be: http://forum.statcounter.com/vb/memberlist.php

5) Disallow various characters in the sign-in name like leading blanks, exclamation signs or others. They are generally used by spammers when they sihn-up to ensure their user id's show up at the top of the members list.

6) To prevent automatic signups, use the CAPTCHA method with a randomly generated graphic password validation - not sure if it's already been done here. I don't know of any bots that can handle that.

[rotarysteve]

I looked at our member list and at least most of the 1st 10 members have links to **** sites. I didn't go much farther through the list though. The idea of deleting members with no activity after a week might be too quick.

In addition to your ideas though, a member who's join date equals the last activity date, and after a certain period of time and/or a blatant domain name. Looks like several members last activity date is in 1969, which I'll guess may of happened when the forum was updated.

I like the NO MERCY idea......

[webado]

1969 is the year resulting from a date field set to 0 = never. That should go with a post count of 0 as well.

If on top of that there's a website url, no matter what, then it's pretty obvious why they even signed up.

Ironically the older forum had better tools for sorting through members, at least at the user level. VB's memberlist is geared towards an actual search with precise terms. A mix of the two would be best. Oh, well... maybe admins have them.

[howard]

Christina,

Thanks for posting this. The problem is worth discussing.

Howard

[webado]

Actually I ought to have thanked Howard for providing those links and prodding me to post this

Thanks Howard.

[howard]

this bot say reply good...



many of post not real...



have happy when getting linked...



enjoy when get seo higher to visit my site...















You are welcome Christina!

-Howard

[RockyB]

You get the feeling that people may have TRIED to do this with my site, but failed. I've got a few who signed up and never came back, but none of them actually added a web-link to their profiles :P