Idea to cut down on spammers
 

There has been lots of spam threads on here for the last few months and it seems to be getting worse. On another forum I belong to, the website won't let you create a thread until you've made 25 post.

I like this thread and topic. Our spammer is getting tiresome. It appears the moderators are reacting faster to spam alerts but the bugger keeps coming. So we need to come up with new measures to thwart them.

Woody, I like your idea of a thread response count. Would 25 be too high? Looking at it from a legitimate new user. Maybe 10? Is a new user made aware of the count? (Woody, not asking you specifically, just throwing things out there.) Will the spammer just start responding to random threads to spread his crap? An advantage of a thread count is it might force the legitimate new user to search vs starting the typical newbie threads like "will these rims fit" or "what oil should I use".

Without getting geeky, would it be possible to ban IP addresses? This bozo is probably coming in with the same PC and would be the same IP addr ea time. Maybe set up a rule if you spread spam, your IP addr gets banned?

Just trying to advance the discussion and solve our community's problem.

The forum is also on an old version of vBulletin (3.8) which was released in 2009.
I would imagine that they've added some anti-spam capability in the past 7 years but don't know for sure.

Wayne - if you're out there, can you look at whether an upgrade will mitigate some of the spam?

Banning IPs doesn't work because an ISP or a company may map multiple users and systems to the same external IP. If you ban the IP you may block several legitimate users.

Anker

How about we capture the MAC address which is specific to a DEVICE, add it to a ban list and turn their device OFF whenever they come to this sites pages.

They ought to grow tired of waiting through reboots quite quickly I would say.

We could even be meaner about it and capture their info and supply it to other spammers/scammers email lists. That ought to change their focus for quite a while.

There is enough software out there to block bots efficiently. You don't need a vB update for that.

Regards, Markus

cost
 

if it costs money to update I would be glad to help otherwise..... no forum no car for me!

It looks like most of them create an account then post Garbage. Is it possible to not clear the account to make a post for 24 to 48 hours.

Unfortunately that doesn't work either. The best mechanism, but easily defeated, is to put a unique cookie into the browser and compare the cookie with cookies of known spammers. If I were the web developer I would make response times unbearably long. Easily implemented in code ont he browser. But this site uses a commercial piece of Forum software, so 986furum can't make arbitrary changes to the code.

Anker

What is with having to wait 60 seconds between reports? What's the point of this? So people don't bother reporting? I logged on yesterday and three quarters of the new posts were spam...

Can we have multiple moderators? I come here every day basically and I wouldn't mind deleting the threads as I see them.

I don't understand how kikkoman has amassed 31 spam posts before his account being deleted.

One thing we all can do is make sure we ALL are reporting the spammers. Whomever the moderators are - let's flood their inbox with spam notices much like our poor forum is getting flooded with spam.

Maybe then they will take some action.

Does everyone know how to report a post? Took me a bit to notice it - but the little red exclamation mark in the lower left corner under the persons profile. Click it and report it.

I report them every time i see them.

Looking like half of new threads are spam:(