Spam-Bots on board

phreak

Hi all,

I recently noticed an increase in Spam-Bot registration in my forum. They are still not posting, but i'd like to have some kind of prevention for this kind of user registration.

Maybe a captcha or another tool could help.
Cool would also be an option to delete more than one user at once.

What do you think?

zeaksblog

I'm pretty sure Vanilla has a Captcha setting

bobtheman

same, i have around 50 bots registered... not posting yet but pretty sure they are spam bots

BiosElement

Recaptcha catches most, but not all of them. If they get through, there needs to be another way to handle them.

dan39

This has been confirmed. reCaptcha was recently cracked.

http://www.allspammedup.com/2011/01/google-recaptcha-cracked/

Stopforumspam.com seems to have some resources for creating new plugins. Vanilla is missing from their list of forums:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/contributions

Lincoln

I just nuked an idle bot from my site yesterday and was starting to think about going thru records to see if there had been others. I'm definitely looking at coding up some better moderation tools to control bots and trolls.

oliverraduner

I don't know if stopforumspam.com provides kind of a "blacklist" - but integrating something like this would be a perfect solution to prevent SPAM bots. Because all of the bots that applied on my Vanilla forum are listed there.

Vanilla could check username & e-mail (important) vs. the entries in such a list - best is even when the list would be online (through a URL), thus always up-to-date.

garymardell

Im surprised there is no askimet plugin yet, unless i'm missing it.

Shadowdare

That would be nice to have. I'm using the ProxyConnect plugin which allows me to use the WordPress login system, where a StopForumSpam plugin is readily available.

Lincoln

Should've mentioned: spam issues are getting some attention from the devs. Definitely on the radar.

mandel23

StopForumSpam is definitely a great resource (@oliverraduner, it's a blacklist based on user names, email addresses and IPs) - we use it and are stopping something like 5 or 6 spambot registrations per day. Like @Shadowdare, we're using ProxyConnect but with our own custom registration system so we cooked up our own script to check new registration attempts against the spammer database. So far we've only had a couple of false negatives out of almost 1200 attempts to register.

Todd

Hi all. I've been coding some pretty major spam handling into Vanilla. It's not ready yet, but it will end up going hand in hand with StopForumSpam and Akismet to begin with.

Pixelnated

Awesome @Todd! Really looking forward to that

pabloko

I've done this
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/16777/stop-spam-changed-the-captcha

oliverraduner

Aaaaaahhhh! I got overrun by Spam Account requests: currently @ 1208 requests!

But this is still on 2.0.17.6... I am just so sad the multi-select action does not work in this release :(

UnderDog

@oliverraduner
Download 2.0.18 and check the url in your own site of where you want the multi-select to work
Then go in the source (separate forum thread if you have questions) and see what files need to be changed for the multi-select
Check the files of 2.0.18 for possible changes. There are ways to merge those 2 files, from your old version and 2.0.18
Hope it makes sense

luc

Well, maybe easier to install latest 2.0.18 on a separate folder but using his current database. This way, no issue for his forum, and he can evaluate 2.0.18 at the same time :).

oliverraduner

@UnderDog Thanks for the tip. But as proposed by @luc I will go directly with the latest release...

shovenose

Hello, is there any progress? I want to make my Vanilla forum check Stop Forum Spam for known IP and email (I'm not concerned about username) and also to display SolveMedia CAPTCHA instead of ReCaptcha. thanks!

Anonymoose

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/botstop-plugin