Anti Spam Software Installed

[Ken Puls]

I don't imagine that anyone here noticed, as most of the spam has been caught in moderation, but the board has been attracting too much spam in my opinion. I want to ensure that this forum is for legitimate use, and that no one has to spend any time trying to wade through garbage.


To that effect, I've installed a new anti-spam plugin to the board which:

• Tests the IP address, username and email of a registrant against a large database of known spammers. If they are on the list, it denies registration.
• Tests a set number of posts against an algorithm to see if they are "spammy". I'm not going to give the number, for obvious reasons, but it shuts off after a while as I don't want my good users board experience to suffer.

If anyone runs into any issues with this, please use the contact form on my main site to send me a message so I can look into it.

Thanks!

[Ken Puls]

Well, it seems to be working so far. The engine has denied 69 known spammers from registering for the site in under 24 hours so far. That's a cool thing.

I've also gone through my database and pruned out all the users who were registered as spammers in the database, so now the usercount is back to only real people and the half dozen test accounts I set up.

[XL-Dennis]

Ken,
Just to please my curiosity, what is the name of the software You use?

[Ken Puls]

Hi Dennis,

It's got a great name... Spam-o-Matic. (It's an addin for vBulletin.)

it verifies it's info against the Stop Forum Spam database, and allows auto-submission of any that slip through too. Also uses Wordpress's Akismet to scan in addition to it's own engine.

It seems to be pretty successful so far, as I didn't have any slip through yesterday.

[Ken Puls]

Wow... I just looked at the blocked spammer stats... 1161 since install. Almost 100 blocked attempts to register per day. Unreal. Glad I implemented this!

[Simon Lloyd]

Wow... I just looked at the blocked spammer stats... 1161 since install. Almost 100 blocked attempts to register per day. Unreal. Glad I implemented this!

Ken i had (have) this, i turned it off because it was denying some real would be members, the truth of the matter is you will never stop the determined organic spammer, the rest can be foiled with using the Q&A way of human verification. After i turned it off i didn't get a rise in sign ups because the Q&A was doing it's stuff but obviously i will still be getting the amount spammer hits as the system reported (around 300 per day). So i guess i'm saying take the results that you have now as a benchmark, turn it off (or at least turn off the deny registration but keep it logging, make sure the log is cleared first) in favour of Q&A and see if you get a rise in spam registrations against how many the log reports.

If there's no visible increase then ditch the mod and save your valuable resources e.g bandwidth, memory and cpu time.