FORUM SPAM nearly 10 per day

same birth date every time

[shortbus1662]

March 28, 1983.

Banning IP addresses isn't helping.

Any suggestions?

[hyperkik]

Is it a vBulletin board?

[maximillianos]

Most sure fire way to stop 98% of spam is to require email validation of all members before they can post.

The remaining 2% won't be robots, so you can control them a bit better.

[shigamoto]

Had the same problem, and as this forum suggested e-mail validation is the way to go. You can ban IPs, but in my case most of them originated from libraries and other places with lots of Internet connected computers shared with the public. So banning the IPs would loose traffic from those places, which is a bit sad.

[jbinbpt]

Find a "Challenge Question" mod for the board. Stopped 100% of our spam.

[trillianjedi]

1. Require email validation

2. Do not accept hotmail, gmail etc addresses as valid. Require a "real" email address (lists abundant on the net).

3. Use captcha to slow down bots

4. No more than 1 signup per "person" in any 24 hour period to slow down bots (look for commonality - the birth date above is one example you already have - b-class IP and UA matching work well. Insist on setting a cookie etc).

5. If spam is a problem, again look for comonality. New member signs up and minutes/seconds later drops a URL in the forum? It's very easy to detect and trap that. Have a pre-moderated area to dump "suspect" posts.

99.9% of automated or persistent activity on a forum can be detected automatically.

TJ

[hyperkik]

If it is vBulletin, there are lots of suggestions at vBulletin.com and vBulletin.org. The most helpful I have found is making sure that the captcha uses TrueType fonts. (Do not use GD Simple Font for the captcha unless the other options aren't supported by your server.)

[GrendelKhan TSU]

Find a "Challenge Question" mod for the board. Stopped 100% of our spam.

same here. ^^ and vbulletin has a great and easy one to implement.

Also, check out this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]