In regards to spam

[PinkStar]

My forum is up and I have installed plugins recommended to fight bots and spam.
My questions is, how long before the bots find the forum? I would prefer to tweak the forum before I promote/invite people as noone wants to join a spamforum.

Another question regarding spam: Under user & Groups are alot of options to set different Groups. But no option to create a Group where the new members first X number of posts are moderated.
I find it hard to always identify a real user from a fake, when all you have to go by is a username and e-mail. So to prevent atleast the first post from a brand new user would be most helpful.
Are there a plugin for this? I have searched but not found one.

Thanks, PinkStar

[sarisisop]

It won't take them long to find you, they will find you quicker than Google. Try setting your registrations to Admin Activation or close it for registrations and register your chosen members manually till you get going.

Not sure about moderated first posts but you could use Extra Forum Permissions plugin and disallow links to newbies. http://mods.mybb.com/view/extra-forum-permissions

[PinkStar]

Yes, I'm aware of the efficency of spambots. To manually Activate is not really what I wanted since I've had problem in the past to identify spammers based on user/e-mail. I figured it would be clear when I view their first post if they are real or spam.

Thank you for the link, to atleast disable spamlinks is better than nothing.

Thanks, PinkStar

[sarisisop]

No problem, sorry I couldn't help with your other question.

You may also be interested in : http://mods.mybb.com/view/auto-website-r...in-profile
read my review it does work.

[PinkStar]

Installed the Extra Forum Perm but after I activated it I still don't see the Extra tab. I got no errors and all appears fine. Tried re-doing it but to no avail.
The install doc does tell you to do it twice but still no go.
Anyone experienced something similar?

Thanks, PinkStar

---

Hmm how weird, I tried quoting Sarisiop and instead quoted myself. I edited out the quote and ended up I deleting my own previous message...

In my previous message I did say Thank you to Sarisiop

[New2mybb]

And if you want to stop spam bots to post any thing use this
http://mybbhacks.zingaburga.com/showthread.php?tid=1006

[PinkStar]

Ah that looks great, thank you so much for the link.
The only concern is how it deals with links: "Every link posted will add to the weighting, and links with similar keywords or to the same domain get penalised more heavily."
The people who I'm going to invite will post links to their homepages and e-mails and such, wich is allowed. I'm not sure what the " similar keywords /same domain" refers to and how to set the settings correctly...

Edit: I have now installed and sat up the config and there's a field to add safe domains and that is what I needed to prevent my real posters from getting caught by misstake.

Thank you again
PinkStar

[sinbad]

PinkStar...

What I have done with success is set to manually activate new users and require location for registering. On a new account, I look at the registration location and then do an IP search. If the IP search comes back totally false, I block that IP and delete the account. So far, no spammers have made it in, but I've deleted around 400 registrants.

The other thing I had to do to alleviate server overload was to block Baidu Spiders at the CPanel level. Once I did that, the number of false accounts registered dropped from 3-5 daily to 2 per month. This may not be a good solution for retail use, but for small information sharing group, perfect.

[PinkStar]

Hello Sinbad,
Good idea with the ip check. I will keep that in mind if my current setting isn't enough.

I looked in the Config > Spiders/Bot and saw that Baidu is listed there. How do I block? Click Edit > User Group >Banned - or should I delete it?

Thank you,
PinkStar

[sinbad]

I used the CPanel provided by host provider (server) and used .htaccess to deny access at the root. I can't remember the exact text but can post later once I get back to my home base or maybe someone else will chime in. I did it at the server level instead of the forum level because I was trying to reduce the "exceeded server load" issue my site was experiencing.

A couple things to know about using the location requirement:

Bots have difficulty creating a location, so most of the bot attempt to create accounts would give a location like "ldhpeffg". Total gibberish and easy to spot. A quick scroll down to that on the user profile and you know it is a spam attempt. The other is if a person is attempting to fake an account, often time the IP was spoofed and there will only be one IP listed on the profile (current). For a legit attempt, there will be two IP addresses (current and last accessed) which may be same, but will have two instead of one. Also, if the user states USA as location but IP says Pakistan, then you should be suspicious and act accordingly.