The spam here is insane!

[Anonymous]

Hopefully the Administrators are already using these to help defeat the spammers:

1. Make sure links in your forum are set to ‘nofollow’. This tells search engine crawlers not to follow the links and therfore, SEO spammers will derive no benefit from spamming your forum.

2. Make sure registration includes a CAPTCHA. Captcha’s are those slightly deformed images of words and you see on sign up pages. Captcha’s do a pretty good job of keeping out spam bots.

3. Require email confirmation before allowing someone to post. Bots and humans can get around this but it's an extra bit of efforts that most real people won't mind.

4. Enable anti-spam plugins. These plugins can automatically detect suspected spam based on links, IP addresses, email addresses and the comment itself. Keep in mind that these plugins are not 100% effective and do sometimes return false positives.

5. BLOCK CHINA!!!!! Virtually all forum spam (and blog comment spam) originates in:

China
Vietnam
Ukraine
Russia
India
Pakistan
More than a third of all forum spam comes from China!

Unless your site targets people from the part of the world, there’s no need to cater to them. You can safely block them from participating on your site. They can still see and read the site — they just cannot comment or post. (And in the atypical case that you get that one person that is an asset to your site — but simply happens to live in an area of the world surrounded by spammers — you can always manually create an account.)

Think about it: you can reduce at least 33% of your spam by blocking China alone.

Read more: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/websites/stop-forum-spam.htm#ixzz5ncCS04ce

 

[i3Houston]

Not sure, if there is a way to do a phone verification....where code is sent to cell phone#.

 

[alohart]

Not sure, if there is a way to do a phone verification....where code is sent to cell phone#.

I'm not going to add my cell phone number to another site. I get too many spam phone calls as it is.

 

[Exi3]

Hi Everyone, here's a quick update:

Sorry for all the spam - I am trying to check the board daily and delete and ban IPs as necessary.

We have updated the forum software, including the anti-spam plugin that connects to stopforumspam.com database.

We have also added recaptcha to the registration system, so in order for a spammer to get through, they have to be coming from a 'new' IP address that has never been reported for spam before, and they need to be a human clicking on the recaptcha and also confirming their account with a valid email address.

There do still seem to be some spammers getting through, which indicates they are manually registering the accounts. So, we can't really do anything else... unless someone else has another idea for us to try?

Mike

 

[vreihen]

There do still seem to be some spammers getting through, which indicates they are manually registering the accounts. So, we can't really do anything else... unless someone else has another idea for us to try?

1) Throttle posts to one per minute per user, if the forum software allows. Makes cleanup easier when they can only post 60 messages in an hour.

2) Set new users as moderated until you are sure they are real people.

3) Utilize the banned words list, if the forum software has the feature. Throw some cut/paste random clips from the current Asian-language spam posts into the banned words list, along with recent common spam terms of degree, university, and diploma.

4) Take a lesson from my upcoming book, "Herding Cats: Keys to Effective Management in a Volunteer Organization." Chapter 2 is titled "Delegation is the Key to Salvation," and explains how a leader needs to delegate tasks to prevent burnout. (Chapter 1 is titled "Planning Your Exit Strategy," because every action that you take as the manager of a volunteer organization from day one needs to consider the continuity of the organization when you lose interest in it and decide to move on. ) Anyway, if more moderators are needed to delete spam or approve new user posts, solicit the active membership for a few volunteers to share the labor.....

 

[gt1]

1) Throttle posts to one per minute per user, if the forum software allows. Makes cleanup easier when they can only post 60 messages in an hour.

The latest spam wave posts ones in two minutes... Excellent advise otherwise.

This is a low volume forum, new user premoderation would be the most effective without much burden. You can give the approval rights to some long time users. Also the hyperlinks and attachment rights should be granted after a certain number of posts.
There are plugins that detect and prevent crossposting of similar texts.