spam bots
I freakin' hate them.
Back in the day, I ran a PHPBB2 forum with one of my buddies, Mark, who is also a director of our company, along with Callum Haywood. Anyway, every day we used to delete a spam post. Sometimes three a day. Here are some hints to stopping spambots:
First of all, image verification is good, but a simple math problem also helps. According to, IIRC, ZDNet(it might have been someone else, not really sure), 50% of spambots can get through image verification. So use a simple math proble on the registration page. Mods are availible for most forum softwares out there, and my company's soon to be realeased forum software will use it also.
Another thing to do, unless you have many Asian users, is to ban the +12 hour time zone. It's common for bots to use that time zone for registration. A PHPBB mod is out there that does that exact purpose, and there should be a vB mod for it. That will be a feature in the release version of PB467.
And another thing, banning IPs helps, as does banning their usernames, but deleting the accounts is the best thing to do. Bots see the bot names and decide to register again on those forums to cause more annoyence. Delete the accounts ASAP.
Hope all this helps,
Reply With Quote