hello there
I run a test forum at
http://testsite123456789.site50.net
and there I test out features etc before going on my site
have not been on the test site in ages
I came on and found lots of users and lots of post
to me they spam how can I tell if they real users
seems weird I never spread my site out and this happens
how do I secure site so this does not happen??
I puzzled how they got my site ?? i do not understand
If you're site was live, then they can find it. If you haven't actively been using your forum, you can probably safely wipe all users and posts without concern of eliminating legitimate users. Most legitimate users are not going to spend the time or energy to post on a forum full of bot spam.
Do you have akismet activated? That should catch the majority of it.
I have 99.999% eliminated all spam on my forum with one excellent plugin. The only way spam gets on is if a user manually puts it. I think we've had one spam message since the plugin was installed 9 months ago or so. That was by a manual registration and post... and we don't use akismet or captcha. The captcha from MyBB, while the thought is appreciated, is useless as far as I could tell. Google captcha is a huge pain in the lime for users to read, if they can read it at all.
http://mods.mybb.com/view/are-you-a-human-captcha
The only downside is that it may take a bit more juice / CPU resources to run, but I haven't had any issues with it maxing them out. It works with GoMobile as well.
You can also use registration questions. I used this for awhile and it's very effective.
http://mods.mybb.com/view/registration-s...y-question
akismet is activated
on my main forums I got registration question'
it only a test forum I not worried what harm is there
I pmed a few users I verified email addresses and they are real many are activated users
amazing thanks for the plugins I will install now
cheers
registration question is very effective, but if you use simple questions, the bots will know the answers. and if the question is too difficult users will get frustrated with trying to answer it. especially if your forum has many different language users. have to find some middle ground.
areyouahuman has been excellent for me. i mean awesome. seriously you can eliminate all other captchas and plugins if you use it.
the only caveat is that if you already have a ton of bot users, they will still be able to post. i'm surprised akismet hasn't caught a lot of it. though if it's been inactive for a long time, some will invariably get through.
latest mybb running on the test site
my forum
http://thomasthemagician.com/forum is perfectly fine
just my testsite has spam on it i enabled features to secure my test site 😃