SolarStrike Software

Spam has been increasing again lately. I'm sure some of you have noticed a few spam posts per day. Most of the attempts do not get through, however, some manage.

Thousands of IPs from Belarus and China have been used to register accounts that lay dormant for awhile only to pop up and post garbage at a later date. Some of these IP ranges have been banned and had any associated accounts deleted. There should not be any legitimate users that have had their accounts deleted.

Goncalves84 wrote:Nice! Just wanted to respond. I thoroughly loved your post. Keep up the great work on http://www.solarstrike.net .

Great example right there..

Maybe create a usergroup called something like "sinbin" that restricts what they can do regardless of how long ago they joined forum, no PM's and can't post links/images/files. So Rock and I can add spammers to the group when we see them, so it's not a ban but they go back to being restricted for you to deal with later.

It might not be my business, but increasing the captcha level should help. I am running forum on SFM (Simple Machines Forum) script and I had like 4-5 registered spam users daily, adding keycaptcha (google for it) solved my problem.

That's not a bad idea. Maybe use captcha for new users for a certain amount of time or a certain number of posts.

Those captcha things drive me absolutely nuts to the point if it fails more than twice I don't even bother to join that forum.

I've messed around with a few different captcha plugins, and reCaptcha seems to work the best so far. Still, it doesn't get everything. Thing is, these accounts were already registered a long time ago and left unused for awhile. Now, I'm retroactively trying to remove all of these accounts before they post any spam.

That's why I like the idea of doing it by number of posts. You already record how many posts people have made. That way it wouldn't matter how old the account is, if they haven't posted the minimum number of posts then they get a captcha.

Perhaps. I'm not sure how much work that would require or if it would cause issues when it comes time to update.

However, I did wipe another ~3,000 accounts that were either unused or going to be used for spam.

Setting captcha for postnig (certain amount of posts) affects few files so when it comes to phpBB update could cause some problems.