way to stop spammers??

[gpk_gti]

hi dubbers,
noticed the last few days we are being bombed by spammers on our site offering their links.Seems its easier to do this than turn up at a vw cruise driving a magna!hehe.
Maybe there should be a time delay between registering and posting? or some other way? just a thought not a criticism.

[BLKMJC]

Thats a good suggestion and love the magna throw in !!

I've implemented visual human checks for clients before. The problem is a lot of these spammers employ very cheap labour and actually defeat human checks with humans! glory

[gpk_gti]

hehe,magna is the flavour of the month around these parts!!hehehe
I remember joining a website a while ago where it took a day for my account to activate.maybe that would also work here?? save some time for admin and save us getting emails from our subscriptions?
how many of these phantom members make up our head count?

[BLKMJC]

I think its a feature in vBulletin but not sure. Its very annoying tho.... like waiting for hot pizza to cool before u can munch

[brackie]

Patience...

Yeah, guys, I'm aware of the delayed activation option however in this new world of instant gratification many people who sign up want to post immediately so I've avoided using it. When my satellite broadband gets connected (hopefully next week ) I'll be downloading and installing the latest version of vBulletin that has much tighter security and will negate most of our problems. Believe me, these spammers consume a lot of the admin team's time and we want to improve the situation badly. By the way, most of this spam comes from robots, not real people and is generated by slave computers often without the knowledge of the owner.

[gpk_gti]

has this got something to do with YAHOO slurp spiders on our forum??
WOW you are getting broadband!!! PARTY!!!!!

[Golf Loon]

Yeah roll on the upgrade, I have been deleting heaps of spam recently.

Brackie with Broadband!! Woweee!@

[brackie]

Slurping along

has this got something to do with YAHOO slurp spiders on our forum??

No mate. The "slurp" spider is a legit robot. It enters the site and follows the links to all pages and posts, then it indexes them. Theoretically, if somebody in Eastern Mesopotamia types, "BBS wheels" into Yahoo search it will come up with all of our posts that include BBS wheels (eventually ) but we'll be well down the list.

[gpk_gti]

ahh ok,,, just didnt know what the spider was.I noticed a few of them yesterday on forum.The guys that leave the spam do they leave valid email addresses? are they @yahoo by any chance?? some forums dont allow @yahoo addys and some you have to pre register with a @hotmail addy.

[DubSteve]

ahh ok,,, just didnt know what the spider was.I noticed a few of them yesterday on forum.The guys that leave the spam do they leave valid email addresses? are they @yahoo by any chance?? some forums dont allow @yahoo addys and some you have to pre register with a @hotmail addy.

Some don't even let you register without a hotmail addy.

But the spammers are a bunch of w@#%ers. Get a life.

Brackies getting broadband PARTY tonight at his house

[rayray086]

More pics in posts!

When my satellite broadband gets connected (hopefully next week )

Hopefully we'll be able to post more pics per post then

[DubSteve]

Hopefully we'll be able to post more pics per post then

I'd say no cause there are other people that only have dial up it wouldn't be fair to them.

[brackie]

Stay cool

Stay cool with the spammers, guys. It'll all be fixed soon so just ignore them. We will delete them and their posts as soon as we see them but a bloke has to earn a living so we can't sit at the computer all day.

I've just found and applied a patch that stops new members posting messages until they visit a link that is sent to them in an email when they sign up.

If a user's account is not activated by the user visiting the link, it will remain in the 'Users Awaiting Activation' usergroup.

This will stop a lot of the robot, however as with all hackers it's just a matter of time before they find a way around it. Also it's work for admin as we have to check out the "Users awaiting registration" and clear out the rubbish.

[BLKMJC]

Didnt this version of vB have that feature already? It should stop most bots but I think you'll notice theres quite a bit of human spammers too...

[gpk_gti]

you could say they are robotic human spammers