MyBB Community Forums

My MODs have been reporting the following...

Quote:I've been noticing several "smart" spam bots that basically copy parts of an old post from a long thread and repost it with spam links at the bottom. The annoying thing is that the technique seems to work well, so well that people in some instances end up replying to posts originally made by themselves!

What are some good ways to reduce/stop this, outside of requiring manual approval for new users.

(Which brings up a question... If you set it so that they have to manually approve, can MODs do that job? Or does it require an Admin?)

Thanks,

If you set it to "manually approve", mods can do it too.

You could use this: http://community.mybb.com/thread-63764.html
or the Akismet plugin which is in MyBB by default if you already have a lot of spam on your forum.

There was one of these here the other day, I must say I was rather impressed, their post pretty much made complete sense, it was in context and referenced the merge system and SMF.

Realistically though there's very little, if anything, anyone can do about this. It's highly unlikely Akismet would pick this up as it wouldn't really consider it spam. Manually approving requires ACP access but even then you've no way of knowing if the account is going to become a spam account. To be honest, active staff are going to be the best way of stopping this. No machine or script is going to be able to pick these types of spammers up whereas a human probably could. The stopforumspam plugin on the Mods site may work if the username they try and sign up with has been listed as a spam account, but if they use a different name, or have a different IP, that wouldn't have any effect. Things like this are where humans have to do some work.