Forum spammed

How to block spammer?

[FromBelgium]

Someone was spamming my forum with links to a gambling site. He was addding messages (replying to existing topics and making new topics). He was doing that at a speed of a few messages every minute. I could manually delete them all but he continued to spam as I was doing this. Finally I enabled forum registration to stop him. But I would like to keep my forum open to all (no need to register). Every message he used a different IP address (mainly from Brazil and Mexico). Other ways to stop him?

[rogerd]

As you found, registration is the best way to cut down on automated spamming.

If you really want to keep posting open without registration (not a good idea, IMO, for a variety of reasons), you could use an image verification step. This might annoy your frequent posters, though. I would recommend required registration to post with an image verification during registration. That will keep out most of the automated spammers, though the human ones will still get through.

If your forum has mass-pruning by username, that would allow you to nuke lots of posts at once. (Of course, with no registration, the bot or human spammer could use a different name for each post.)

[Gargen]

i think registration is the way to go users will not mind and cuts out alot of spammers and what spammers you get it is very easy to just hit the delete button on their account

[FromBelgium]

I don't have a very active forum, mostly people looking for information and arriving via SE on my site. Number of posts did drop after enabling registration.

I opened the forum again and have banned about 30 IP addresses but they keep coming with new IP addresses every 20 minutes or so. How do they do it? Is it possible that they send fake IP addresses?

Also my logs are spoiled with referrals from gambling sites. Terrible!

[BlackRaven]

FromBelgium if you are using phpbb there are several mods that will allow you to block Spam.

[rogerd]

Some other ways to block spammers include using your forum's swear filter to block domain names or keywords and turning on flood control (limits posting frequency). IP blocking is of limited use if the spammer is using proxy servers.

[etechsupport]

I think ISP providers should provide such protection like Earthlink which include a spam filter in with other attractive features like virus protection and pop up blockers, these filters can effectively manage spam at the server before delivery.