We have a lot of anti-spam measures up. But one that we need human eyes on is...lately we have been getting spammers physically sign up, post a legit question in the correct forum, and then they try to secretly link their website at the bottom to avoid arousing suspicion.
The only fix seems to be have enough moderators to identify spammers by looking over every new post.
Maybe create a newbie group which has all posts moderated, then autopromote to a regular user group after having 5 or 10 posts? Of course you'd still need enough moderators to go through the posts awaiting approval, but at least your users (and search engines!) won't see the spam messages.
I'd recommend 1 or 2 moderated posts at most. No new user wants to go through 5-10 moderated posts before their posts show when actually posting instead if waiting for moderation....A determined spammer will still get through, but 1 or 2 moderated posts should stop the majority of the real user spammers.
I was just throwing numbers out there.
Try a security question that relates to your forum topic, and the 'newbie group' thing. Might be wise to do a htaccess country block, though these spammers will probably bounce their IP to a different location normally in Eastern Europe.
(2018-01-08, 08:35 PM)laie_techie Wrote: [ -> ]I was just throwing numbers out there.
Right on. Just throwing my recommendation. I had similar issues in the past. Now massively reduced traffic, so I stopped using moderated posts and deal manually with the occasional spam.
we dont want to use moderated posts. It creates even more work of allowing posts, even if it was for their first post only.
I also tried security questions pertaining to my board, but 1) some spammer are asking legit questions meaning they know the board answers and 2) some real legit users might not know the answers and we want to make it easy for them to get in.
I just think its crazy they will go to the extent of posting legit posts/questions with trying to trick us into not purging them due to a single link in their post that shows their true identity.
Which CAPTCHA are you using on your forum for registration?
sorry for late response. Didnt see it til now
We are using reCAPTCHA V2
At user registration, asking people to spell a word backward seems to work. However, though, as you say, a moderator might be needed for more vicious spammers.