I have a little problemo with forum spam, I'm sure many others do to.
In this case, a member registered and created 6 posts - spamming. As I was not around, the moderator had to manually ban and delete all the posts by the user - time consuming.
How do you stop link spam in the first place, from a personal view?
I get a lot of people posting emails and links by new members, just want your to pennies worth. I used the can post links but not working on my forum. My site (all spam removed so you won't see it).
link
I noticed fake signatures, you ever had that? it's where underscores are used to make it look like signatures (because they can't actually get them). The problem is I don't know how they by passed the can post links in the first place.
Anyway, the main question, how do YOU curve link and email adress posting spam on mYBB
Was that aimed at me? If so, i have 7/8 with mod abilities. It's a pain for whoever does it.
The question was aimed at you as what do you to stop it. (I can use that as advice)
It's pretty much impossible to stop non-automated spam. If there's a human behind the keyboard, they can post the same way any other user can. The only way to stop it is to diligently moderate. Yes, it's a pain. Welcome to owning a forum.
If the spam is following some kind of pattern (e.g. link always to the same site) you could tailor a custom solution to block those postings. On another community (not a forum) we sometimes even have to resort to IP filters to block people out (and if any other users suffer from this block, whitelist them). It's sad but sometimes there is no other way.
What you could do in MyBB I guess is two groups... registered users, and trusted registered users, and give mods the power to one click kill registered users who aren't in the trusted group yet. And require users to do I dunno 50 postings in order to become trusted, or whatever is necessary to cause human spammers more work than it's worth.
Of course if you have malicious users who don't spam but want to annoy you personally not even that will help.
Create a user group for New Members and make all their posts moderated. When they reach, say, 10 good posts, automatically upgrade them to a non moderated group. Works on my site site and hides the spam until someone can get to it. If they can't see their posts appearing straight away they will usually go away.
(2009-06-02, 08:47 PM)Bey Brad Wrote: [ -> ]It's pretty much impossible to stop non-automated spam. If there's a human behind the keyboard, they can post the same way any other user can. The only way to stop it is to diligently moderate. Yes, it's a pain. Welcome to owning a forum.
I been trying to tell him this at Mybb Central for a couple weeks. He wants some magical spam solution that doesn't exist.
Quote:In this case, a member registered and created 6 posts - spamming. As I was not around, the moderator had to manually ban and delete all the posts by the user - time consuming.
If you click "find" on any post you will see all that members posts with a checkbox on the right. Select the posts and choose delete. Banning takes a few seconds. What you call time consuming most just call part of owning a forum.
I just clocked myself to delete 6 posts from one member and then to ban them. It was less than 20 seconds. If your moderators can't do this then why are they moderators to begin with?
The stronger you tighten up spam prevention the less friendly your forums will be. You will have an increasing amount of false positives. The best method of preventing spam is good moderation.
Yes, as I've also said, I'm fairly confident in saying there will never, ever, be a method of completely stopping spam other than having to manually approve every single post, and we all know that isn't a viable solution for any forum really. No matter what spam prevention software is created, eventually it will always be figured out and bypassed. When I'm online here I usually catch spam within ~15 minutes. That's part of a moderator's job. Search and destroy. Yes, you can use Akismet, you can use any other spam software there is, still ain't gonna stop it. A program will not always be able to know what spam is, and as a human brain is a hell of a lot more clever than a computer, a person will always know when they see spam, ergo you need to use people to deal with it. Just one of those things people have to put up with. I'm sure everybody wants spam software that will catch every single spam message and give no false positives, of course everybody would want that, but it can't happen.
i have mine set up to where i have to approve members before they can post