MyBB Community Forums

Hello everyone.

I am currently experiencing a spambot problem on my forums.

On my site www.sirfluffyservers.com , I have been having serious problems with spambots.

Examples:

And




It first started with 1 spam user who posted a paragraph of nonsense. It contained a few dodgy links to cheap trainer websites etc. Anyway I banned the user and went about my day. Next thing I know, my off topic section is lit up with like 20 spam posts to gay chat rooms and hidden webcams etc you know the kind of thing.

I deleted all the posts, banned the user and began banning IP addresses and made account verification admin approved only. The problem didn't go away. I checked my forums a few days later and noticed pages and pages of spam bots lying dormant in my forums.

I took the forums down for a while in the hope that they would give up.

They didn't. Those screenshots are from the new forums I rebuilt today. Already! 1 day and there's already 2. Here are some details.



They always seem to have ICQ numbers. I don't know why but they do.



They always claim to be around 30 years old.



.pl domains are always there. Whether it's home page or email. Their homepage links are also spam.

[email protected] <-- This is that spammers email address.

Anyone else experienced this problem? And is there a fix! They strawberry suck! I have recaptcha, security question and email verification installed but they seem to be able to break through.

Don't use the default question for the Registration Security question. Get rid of those. Come up with questions that should be visiting your forum would know. If its about Harry Potter, maybe have a question be Who played Harry Potter in the movie Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone.

Hey dragon, I added a few custom but they're all very simply. I'll complicate them and add some questions you have to think about. Thanks for the advice.

you need not have a complex question but avoid using direct questions.

"Type the following word: Hello" would be a better question than "What is the capital of Nauru?"

not to mention, all these tricks and tips are only for spambots. human spammers will bypass everything.

I have a question asking if the visitor is a computer. More than 99% of those who attempted to answer got it wrong (or are too honest, and got blocked because I only want humans).

I use recaptcha and geeks custom plugin.

One of my questions is: "What does the banner say in text." For example if my banner says Hello they would put Hello.

Since I added those tougher security questions, no more spam bots! Will have to see if any have signed up this time next week. Then I know it's clear.

(2014-06-06, 08:55 PM)Sir Fluffy Whiskers Wrote: [ -> ]Since I added those tougher security questions, no more spam bots! Will have to see if any have signed up this time next week. Then I know it's clear.

This should work pretty well.

It's best to have custom questions because most bots can read captchas, but they don't have a large enough ai too solve a answer such as "Who is the owner."

Yeah I have stuff like What is the community owners SteamID

They won't get that haha!

The spam protection in MyBB 1.8 is better AFAIK. For now, you can use registration security questoins (not default questions), StopForumSpam (checking only email for the least false positives) are the plugins I'd recommend.