MyBB Community Forums

Hello - first-time poster here.

Let me preface this post by saying that I am NOT the admin on my forum. Rather, I am a poster/mod on there. So, my tech understanding of the board code is non-existant.

That aside, I'm having issues keeping a rash of new forum members in check. It seems all of these new "members" start accounts, do not post and leave ads in their profile signatures. They all have the common theme of having two normal names smashed together with a random letter at the front and back (i.e. "pcoreyhayesn" = p+corey+hayes+n).
When I run searches on the names, often they have joined multiple forums within the preceeding day or days, again never posting. Other times, I will check the IP info and find that several of these users will trace back to the same locality - clearly it's the same person registering multiple accounts.

Are these people run-of-the-mill human spammers? Are they bots ? What's going on here and how can I fight it?

Thanks for your help.

Probably, bots maybe human spammers. Banning the ip from the forum and from the server control panel should take care of it. Then go through and delete the accounts manually. You could also have people needing to be activated by an admin. Ask the forum admin to ban the ip though.

They are human spambots, just snip out the links in their signature and give them a permaban.

To fight this, install the StopForumSpam mod by Tim B.

Thanks a lot guys. I will download that mod or have my admin do it. The other revealing thing is that I look through the site logs and see a bunch of searches that include some type of search targeting myBB-based forums. The only reason I can see them doing this is to implement some kind of automated spambot that works on myBB. Anyone else see this sort of thing?

How do you look at the search logs???? I didn't know you could do that.

Riddle -
It's actually not part of the myBB manager - it's a Plesk stat link that my admin provides me to monitor our web traffic for my entire site, not just the forum. Your admin may have a similar tool for you to use.

Usually these guys have the same links to sites. Just add them to your word censor too.

try pruning users after 3 days who have a post cound of less than 1 posts. You'll probably need the admin to do this.

Make signature links nofollow, then put "Signature links are nofollow" in red text above your TOS. Kind of ugly, but one of my boards got to the point where I had 5 spammers a day who DID post. Doing that stopped them pretty quickly.

EDIT: You'd have to get an admin to do that, and it isn't worth the ugliness unless it really bothers you.

do in ip and email wildcard ban so that you can at least reduce the numbers. I noticed a lot of spammers hitting my site all came from similar ip addresses and using the same rubbish email addresses.

If you really want to kill it set an activation limit and a must post thread where they will need to post a hello first.

Wont stop it dead but should greatly reduce the hits