banning African spammers

[Natashka]

Is there a way to ban all visitors from Africa from my forum? They keep registering and sending those scummy messages via PM system to all other members of my forum about transferring millions of dollars into the bank account.

I really had nothing against the African visitors until I opened my forum and they started using my PM system to spam. EACH and EVERY visitor from Africa is doing it! And every time there is a new IP from a different African country. I ban the violators from using PM system of course, but the new spammers keep registering, it's like an epidemic!

Does anybody else suffer from this problem and maybe has some solution? I find it hard to ban Africa, coz unlike for example Asia, or Latin America, or North America, they don't have the fixed IP maps, their IPs are mixed with European ones and I really don't know how to fight this disaster! SOS!

[victor]

One idea,

Manually activate PM for new users -- or only allow it after a number of posts.

For other related ideas, see this other current thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[SEOMike]

Another thing to consider...

Even IF you could ban all of Africa by IP range there are always proxies that can be used. If you ban them by IP, they'll get smart and use an IP you have't blacklisted. SO... other measures as discussed above are probably the right solution.

[xxxxxpp]

Only allow new users to PM after 5 forum posts or so, like victor said.
That sounds like a simple and and working solution