Spammers

Greg,
I have paid for webhosting for my own site for several years and only use a tiny fraction of the bandwidth and server space available to me. (I supposedly have unlimited bandwidth and space available...)

If it doesn't blow my hosting fees out of the water, I'll be happy to hoste the site and give you (and whoever else deemed necessary) admin rights to the forum so it can be maintained properly.

Can you get some info on the current space/bandwidth requirements?
My account can currently load any of these software packages: (I have two small-traffic forums running on SMF currently)

vBulletin Forums (Demo= free, full version $$???)

Simple Machines Forum
2.0.5

phpBB
3.0.12

bbPress
1.1

PunBB
1.4.2

Vanilla Forums
2.0.18.8
 
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I hope we figure something out soon. I'm getting tired of deleting spam and banning mo fos from this site every time I log on.
 
Yup, I'm doing 6-10 per day, and I'm sure Earl and Andy are too.

Still waiting to hear back from Mr IT.COM.

Edit: and if you need at the bottom of the main page "welcome new member" and the nickname is random characters, just pre-banninate it. I'm noticing that they're creating accounts and then coming back 8-10 days later and posting their spam. Probably trying to get around other forums' "no posting for 7 days" limits.
 
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I see I'm not the only one pre-banninating visitors that show up on the bottom of the main page...;)

There's many more of them than us, but at least we can have fun playing whack-a-mole.

- GA
 
Those have already been banninated. Guess they can still log in, but not seeing any spam from them...

I've been taking the u= links and selecting various users with random characters and banning them. The technique seems to be create an account, wait a few days, then spam. So I pre-ban (when I have time) and that seems to have helped.

http://www.improvedtouring.com/forums/member.php?u=24608
 
Good news/bad news.

Good news: Mr IT.COM and I have exchanged some emails, and on my request he has disabled new user registrations on the forum. We were getting around two dozen new accounts per day, all spammers. This will allow us to catch up with all the pending accounts that are coming back soon to spam, and eventually get ahead.

Further, he is going to investigate existing anti-spam options on the current version of the VBulletin software.

Bad news: Mr IT.COM has disabled all new user registrations. Not optimal, but maybe we'll re-enable when we get a handle on those anti-spam options.

News to follow as I get it.

- GA
 
Is there any way to ban members in mass? Just doing a search of members who have joined since 11/1 gives about 130 results; most of those have zero posts. Going back to 9/1 takes it to 1k+ members, again mostly non-posting. Some appear to be legit, but many appear to be computer generated. Too many to ban one at a time for sure.
 
Greg

Thanks for continuing to follow-up. There are definitely remedies - captchas, challenge questions, membership moderation available. I hope that we get this problem squared away pretty soon - my closet is full of Louis Vuitton bags and I don't need any more. :D

Terry
 
Earl, could not find any way to mass-ban. What functions did you use to find the users by date?

Terry, hope those functions are available in this version, it's pretty far behind...I can't even remember the last time it was updated.
 
Greg

Terry, hope those functions are available in this version, it's pretty far behind...I can't even remember the last time it was updated.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure they are available. We have used captchas on another BBS for 5-6 years.

I'm not sure that we are that far behind. We are vB 3.8.2. The brown board is vB 3.7.2 and Apex is on vB 3.87.

Terry
 
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