Forum Spam Bot WARNING! MUST READ!

[nullcity.dev91]

Eversince after 3 days my forum I put on my website, there are many people posting rated X content in just 1 second and I keep deleting, banning, kicking, and even shutting down the forum!

If this has happened to you that someone posted rated X posts in 1 second, then put on
reCAPTCHA before signup and before entering.

Like what I just did, and now there arent bots posting rated X content every hour, admins dont worry, I deleted all the content the spam bots put and I check every forum thread what it contains.

 

[Smith6612]

They constantly hit my blog whenever I make a new post. If I don't post up for a month they all cease to post. I use Akismet to keep the spam at bay.

 

[Dead-i]

I used to own a phpBB forum outside of x10Hosting, and in one month there was 30,000 posts with 8,000 topics of spam and 48,000 users! I then incorporated the reCaptcha system into my forum and purged the entire forum, and within a day there were 2,000 more! I then read online that Q&A Captcha is the most effective, and there have been no spam since.

 

[theone48]

Wow! that bad eh. I know how nefarious the e-mail variety is, but had no idea about forums.

 

[nullcity.dev91]

Before you enter the forum, I made a re-direct to http://nullcity.x10.bz/verify.php

 

[erescripts22]

phpBB3 have a good guide about it: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2122696&p=12961708 (even if you don't use phpBB3, it might be good to read it).
As you see, the most effective method is to block every registration at UTC -12.
Also, use Q/A or a more custom captcha instead of using the known captchas, like reCAPTCHA or GD CAPTCHA.

I myself use Q/A+two custom profile fields.

 

[SierraAR]

I've never had a problem with bots on anything I've run (Those being forums and blogs, for the most part). Of course, I've always used security and anti spam measures such as akismet, recaptcha, email authentication, and anti-bot Q&A's (And now CloudFlare, thanks to that new partnership.)

There was one occasion where a bot got so far as to post comments, but none of them got to the public since I require all new users to have at least one previously approved comment on my blogs. It works out quite nicely.

 

[stpvoice]

Moved to Off Topic.

 

[nullcity.dev91]

Haha! Everyone moves along!

 

[ChatIndia]

yes, they constantly attack my forums, my blogs.

 

[techairlines]

Spam is sadly inevitable with websites.

My main site is WordPress so I use Akismet and CloudFlare to keep spam away.

It's unfortunately been flagging a lot of legitimate comments lately so I'm using a plugin called Conditional Captcha where all comments that fail Akismet will get reCAPTCHA. I have found this to be very effective as there are very few human spammers attacking my site. Plus, legitimate commenters don't have to fill out any captchas.

I'm sure bots will get smarter in the future but for now, this works for me.