Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Wow. It seems as though it is Woking better than expected!!! It should use the ip address to find who is spam!

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Brandon,
Are they signing up and then vetted or will it not even allow the signup? Which ever it is it's working :)

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

They change their IP, post spam and are reported to sfs. Every other forum knows if it it's being spammed, then!

Hey Brandon,
If any spam gets in, just press the report button to allow the database to be updated.

Sorry about the typo

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Stop Spammers, if that is the plugin that is being used, will prevent signups, by redirecting the spammer/spambot to a fake register page. That way, they will get tricked.

Here's a link to the plugins: http://stopforumspam.com/contributions
This is the one that I use: http://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-sp...ations-plugin/


EDIT:
According to the plugin page (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=176481), it just denies the request, but does not create a fake signup page.

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Outstanding. We are all appreciative of a reduction in spam.

Great work, Brandon. Thanks for suggesting a working solution, Devyash.

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Wow, there was quite some spam that just got in! Is there any second defense like Askimet? I never get any spam through because if SFS doesn't stop it, Askimet will remove the post!

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

All users already go through an initial period where all of their posts are filtered through Akismet.

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

I see! I have a feeling that these users are from the "22" users that were allowed in! Sign up first, spam later, after all suspicion is gone!

I am going to create a new account, with the username, test12345, to see what security borders there are. I'll delete it afterwards!


---------------

Here's what I noticed:
Your Captcha is very simple. It is possible to OCR it.
You have a good question verification
You do not have any e-Mail address validation. You might try looking for a plugin that verifies email addresses by doing a DNS lookup.
Put some harder questions, that make the user think. We are robotics students. We have brains! Zombies, please don't come after us :D
Have some plugins, like Stop Spammers or Askimet afterwards.

You may want to look into reCapatcha. On my forum, I used to get 10 spammers a day, until I installed reCapacha.
Try keyCapatcha! Not only is it really good, it is fun too!

Good Luck :D

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

The hotfix seemed to work well for a while, but the spam is now returning at seemingly comparable levels to before...

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Yes, spam has returned. It is a difficult task, since the spammers are humans, not spambots. They post a thread, then go in and edit it to add the hyperlinks.

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Thanks for all the work you do to keep this site up!

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Wait, so what do you have against team 180? :/

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

I noticed that you are using the forum's built in capatcha (letters on image, to read and type). Have you tried reCapatcha? It reduced my forum spam by 75% by itself! the built in character generation sucks, because it is possible to OCR it easily! Just keep rotating the frame until it shows up as an actual alphanumeric letter. Also, adding special symbols, like #,$,@, etc. can stumble many spambots!

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Much of our spam appears to be posted by actual human beings in foreign countries. Not sure how much changing capatcha systems would help.

Re: Anti-Spam Plugin Installed
 

Well, "Stop Spammers" is great for stopping human spammers, however, the database is still incomplete! It is impossible to keep a list of spammers and their IPs and other info! It is also easy to hide their IP addresses by using an anonymous proxy! Maybe, there can me a censor to see how many links there are, compared to the unlinked words. Many spam posts are like this:

Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!
Go to Google!

There should be an algorithm, of the ratio of links to words. If there are too many links, the post would require moderation!