Spammers

[Vassago]

I'm from Florida and I work nights, so I can usually consistently cover everything while DCrake is not on. I'm probably working and monitering on here for the timeframe of someone in Australia. Where are the spam threads you speak of Rich? I just deleted some from the last hour.

[Jon]

I am looking into enabling the Akismet spam filter for the first X number of posts. I'm hoping it might help.

[Jon]

Just installed the Akismet anti-spam service. Can you let me know how well it works? It scans the first x number of messages someone submits and checks if its spam or not. But I am not sure how that will reduce the workload since I presume you still have to ban the spammer etc. Feedback please.

[Vassago]

How does it alert us?

[Vassago]

Originally Posted by Jon

Just installed the Akismet anti-spam service. Can you let me know how well it works? It scans the first x number of messages someone submits and checks if its spam or not. But I am not sure how that will reduce the workload since I presume you still have to ban the spammer etc. Feedback please.

It helps a lot as far as I've seen. It places the posts/threads in a moderated queue. We still have to manually delete them and ban the user, but it stops it from appearing on the forum, which is well enough.

Is there a way to prevent users from having links in their signatures until their post count reaches something much higher, like say 25 or even 50? I don't see any reason to allow someone with a post count under 50 to have links in their signature anyway.

What about a way to prevent links in visitor messages? That seems to be one of the latest trends for spammers.

[equity space]

A great solution to "SPAMMERS" is to have a SPAM thread; e.i., "SPAMMERS POST HERE." Why would this be a great idea? Because it prevents them from posting annoying messages all over the forum. The idea behind this is to contain it; not to have to make so many restrictions and burn up resources trying to manage the SPAM thing.

Furthermore, 99% of the links you see from SPAMMER's isn't actually SPAM. Their objective is to simply create a back link to this forum to help their page rankings. They could care less if you click onto their links. Matter of fact, they don't want you to find their links at all because they risk being banned.

I've seen forums use this approach and works great. If members don't want to read what's in the SPAM threads, don't visit. Interesting enough, Admins will tell you that most members pay a visit to this thread anyway. Go figure.

[boblarson]

Originally Posted by equity space

Furthermore, 99% of the links you see from SPAMMER's isn't actually SPAM. Their objective is to simply create a back link to this forum to help their page rankings. They could care less if you click onto their links. Matter of fact, they don't want you to find their links at all because they risk being banned.

And we do find these very easily and they are banned. This site does not exist for the purpose of helping them with their search engine rankings.