#1 2008-08-24 9:10 pm

Ian M

Member

Registered: 2008-08-24

Posts: 3

Catch a lot of spam before its public

I use your site to check new members to our forum its very handy. I thought I would contibute a little to the fight against spam.
On our forum first I set up email validation of accounts. This catches maybee 5% of the spammers as they use fake email addresses.
The next step was a bot trap. All i did was set up a new membership group called member the default when joining is members. When you belong to the members group you only have acess to one forum the introduction forum there is a notice in there asking the member just to make a post. Once a post is made they automaticaly get promoted to the member group and have full acess. The best bit is that then they do not even see the introduction forum again only visable to admins mods and members. All the bots make the one post and never try again unless the post is removed. The post only gets remove after the ban settings are updated to include them. This means that none of the members ever see the spam. Simple but highly efective

Ian

Last edited by Ian M (2008-08-24 9:10 pm)

skippybosco

Member

Registered: 2008-05-21

Posts: 160

Re: Catch a lot of spam before its public

This is a great idea Ian.

Jim54

Member

From: Tennessee

Registered: 2008-08-04

Posts: 56

Website

Re: Catch a lot of spam before its public

The next step was a bot trap. All i did was set up a new membership group called member the default when joining is members. When you belong to the members group you only have acess to one forum the introduction forum there is a notice in there asking the member just to make a post. Once a post is made they automaticaly get promoted to the member group and have full acess. The best bit is that then they do not even see the introduction forum again only visable to admins mods and members. All the bots make the one post and never try again unless the post is removed. The post only gets remove after the ban settings are updated to include them. This means that none of the members ever see the spam. Simple but highly efective

Ian

How exactly do you set this up? It does sound like an effective way to control bots.

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Jim

Ian M

Member

Registered: 2008-08-24

Posts: 3

Re: Catch a lot of spam before its public

will see if I can document the whole process and post it. Would only be for IPB though but would assume that it can be done on any forum as it only uses basic functions such as permission masks, user groups and automatic promotion from one group to another.

ilwayne

Member

Registered: 2008-08-26

Posts: 4

Re: Catch a lot of spam before its public

It works in PhpBB 2 and Ikonboard, too.  I've been doing it for a long time.  It worked really well until about 9 months ago when the spambots got really out of hand and I started getting behind in doing the necessary work to add them to the ban list et al. 

At this point, I get 40-60 spam registrations a day, though, and frankly I have better things to do than deal with banning and deleting them all.  Manually adding every IP and host name on the list here cut it down to only 20 in the past 24 hours which is an improvement but still not nearly as good as the 5 a month or less that I was getting on Ikonboard.  Is spamming that much worse than it was 18 months ago or was it the switch to phpBB? 

For the record, the way I set up the bot trap is to set up a ranks system where members from 0-1 post are a specific rank and then created a forum that was accessible only to that member rank.  You could do the same thing, though, by assigning member groups if your forum supports that but not ranks.  It doesn't really take any more work either way than admin account approval.