Spam getting out of hand...

[Rob Williams]

Hi all,

I am sure some have noticed, but the spam here has been on the rise over the course of the past few months. It's getting more creative, which is a problem. Instead of a bot/person signing up and immediately spamming a forum, they'll wait a few days and come back to do their deed. The more creative ones will spam via signature, which is a lot more difficult to track.

Over the course of the next week, I'd like to revamp out usergroup settings to virtually cripple brand-new registered accounts until they reach 20 posts. This would include the inability to use BB code and signatures, which should help dramatically with our spam problem.

The problem is that vBulletin is a pain in the ass to configure, so there might be some trial and error. So if you happen to find something not working properly for you, please let me know and I'll attempt to fix it. I might start on this tonight, but it all depends. Once I do make some changes (which would turn out to be a lot of changes, more than likely), I'll post here again.

Thanks all.

[Merlin]

Yeah, they are getting tricky, alright.
I guess they think anything to get a buck. But the thing is, they dont understand , that invaision of personal areas are forbidden.
It's like having sex and the little Geico lizard :D comes in and wants to sell you insurance. ( Is that your belly button? )

My poor postal mail box expands with free stuff everyday. I told the mail lady I didnt want all of this advertising, she just said she had to deliver it all, they paid the postage to send it, she had to deliver it.
No way around that...so I got a P O Box, no spam there at all.
Then my email filled with spam, a good business to make programs that filter the stuff out.
My home phone even gets spammed, if I dont know the number thats calling, I dont pick up. Of course there is the No Call nationwide (https://www.donotcall.gov/) website, but they still get through.

Main point here, piss me off and I wont buy your product....but they still do it.

There all finished in rant

Merlin

[Rob Williams]

It bugs me that it's happening so often now... multiple times each day. It used to be minimal... sometimes only a few times a week. Now, there are more spammers than actual posters, and it's ridiculous.

I've made the first slew of changes. Users with a post count of less than 10 will not be able to use a signature or take advantage of most of the "special" forum features. Private messaging can still be used, unless I find it abused.

Also, as much as I hate to do this, I'm making it so that brand-new users who create a new thread will have it thrown into a moderation queue. That means that a moderator will first have to look at it and then approve. The majority of new users today who sign up and create a new thread are spammers, so I find this move to be necessary. Moderators and staff are often on the forums, though, so it should never take too long for a thread to be approved.

Apologies for all the inconveniences.

[slugbug]

I've noticed a lot of signature spamming on other forums too.

[DarkSynergy]

It's what the kids are doing these days.

[Rob Williams]

Another problem is the fact that some of the sig spam might not be coming from the companies themselves, but competitors. One example is that a lot of our sig spam is being linked to Pinnacle Systems, who is a pretty reputable (I hope) software developer.

What I believe is happening is that a competitor is gung ho in spreading the link around, in order to get it banned and removed from the forums/web sites.

Insane the lengths that competition will go to.

[Rob Williams]

Hmph. That run didn't go so well. It seems that while I made it a rule that posters with under 10 posts would have their threads moderated, it also affected general posts. For whatever reason, those two things cannot be controled individually.

For those who posted and didn't see their post right away, sorry for the inconvenience.

Back to the drawing board.

[madmat]

Well that explains it. Bummer, I just wonder why it has to be so difficult to ride herd on new users or users in general.

[Kougar]

Bjorn3D has it set up that way so people with less than X posts most be moderated to get through... it doesn't affect anyone else above the posting limit? Just letting ya know as it should be doable.

[Rob Williams]

Bjorn3D has it set up that way so people with less than X posts most be moderated to get through... it doesn't affect anyone else above the posting limit? Just letting ya know as it should be doable.

The problem is that it's time-consuming to go through and moderate each and every post that comes through from new users. If we don't moderate certain posts fast enough, new visitors are going to get discouraged and leave.

vBulletin doesn't give a blunt way of seeing the posts that are moderated, either. You need to go to the moderator panel, which is just foolish.

If it continues to become a problem, we might go that route, but I'd hate to. It's just far too time-consuming and a pain for real posters.

[Kougar]

True enough :)

I had thought you were saying that ya didn't think vBulletin had a way to do it, sorry I misunderstood ya.

[Rob Williams]

Nah, vBulletin doesn't allow us to control threads and posts separately. It's all or nothing.

Nor does it allow control over whether or not new users can include URLs in their posts. But get this... we can control whether or not they are allowed to use BB Code or HTML in their signatures. But not their posts.

Figure that one out. For as robust as vBulletin is, their admin system is mostly limiting.

[Rob Williams]

As another update... the spam has been increasing steadily over the past week, so I had to do something about it. Instead of a CAPTCHA, a new user will now be asked a question that a bot is highly unlikely to answer.

Here's to hoping that this will actually work. If it doesn't, there's an obvious fatal flaw with our forum software.

[Rob Williams]

Wow, so it appears some spammers can answer our simple questions and still get through. Whew. Oh well, it's a lot better than it was before... it's been about three weeks since this new method was put into play, and only one spammer who signed up after got through. That's not so bad.

[Merlin]

ooops
Okay.....

[Rob Williams]

Don't copy / paste spam please...

It's all gone now. It's frustrating to deal with :-/