Spam in forum

[Richard Foley]

There's an irregular amount of spam on the site, admins need to spend a little more time cleaning up, or you need more admins :)

[Erik Geurts]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your many reports about spam posts on the forums. I think you underestimate the issue. We spend a lot of time removing spam, the few bits you still see are the unfortunate cases where we're not fast enough.

Ever since the forum was upgraded to a new version of the Invision Powerboard software, the spam fighting features in it have turned out to be just miserable. We've complained with the vendor but they are unwilling or unable to help. Any suggestions from the community to help make IPB more spam-proof would be highly appreciated.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Erik Geurts

[Guest]

Might Revive consider using another type of forum software? I just sent in a bunch of spam bot reports tonight. We use Beehive at our places and we don't have spam issues. On the rare occasion we do get a spammer, it's a live person. Easily dealt with in Beehive, which has a ton of options for dealing with the little roaches.

The software is created by Matt Beale. This is it's home site, http://www.beehiveforum.co.uk/, and it's also on GitHub and SourceForge, but I'd use the SourceForge site for download. What Matt has in the Git he's often working on, adding features, updates, etc. Also, you can easily use Revive on a Beehive forum system. We do on all of ours. Beehive, Ajax Chat (Matt's integration for Beehive), and Revive make one great team.

Beehive is free and open source. Styling it is super easy, plus as Beehive updates your style will still work. Not something some systems I've seen can say. If you need to update your style with them you have to go through many pages, but with Beehive it's just one - style.css. You can see some of the styles we've created at a styles forum we recently set up, http://cfnet.us/beehive_styles/index.php?webtag=HOME. There is also a mods repository available at GitHub if you want some extra features.

Sorry if any of this is out of line, but I thought I could offer up some good options for your site, and making your spammers cry in frustration. :)

If you don't want to move the content from these forums, you could always archive them and start off fresh with a new Beehive forum system. Other sites who made the switch have done it to make things easier for them, and it seems to work fine. :)

[Erik Geurts]

Thanks for the suggestion, that's much appreciated. Does Beehive offer a feature to import the existing content from an IP.Board forum?

[Richard Foley]

 hi Erik,

no, I don't underestimate the spam problem, and spam is crap to deal with, wherever it turns up. I had some success with using a simple "answer a silly question", during registration, which kept most of the spam out of my fairly busy SMN, and we have over 7000 members now. It's not massive, but we're not getting spam like this. Maybe it's an idea...?

Good work from the admins that you do have. Keep it up!

R.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your many reports about spam posts on the forums. I think you underestimate the issue. We spend a lot of time removing spam, the few bits you still see are the unfortunate cases where we're not fast enough.

Ever since the forum was upgraded to a new version of the Invision Powerboard software, the spam fighting features in it have turned out to be just miserable. We've complained with the vendor but they are unwilling or unable to help. Any suggestions from the community to help make IPB more spam-proof would be highly appreciated.

[Erik Geurts]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the suggestion. We tried that already, but the bots out there are much more sophisticated these days, they crack those things in a matter of milli seconds.

You might have noticed today that the volume of spam has decreased. That's because a measure has been implemented to prevent spam in a slightly more sophisticated way. I'm sure you understand why I can't say anything about what was done, but it does seem to have the desired effect. Fingers crossed!

Cheers, Erik

Edited January 26, 2016 by Erik Geurts
typo

[eslim]

You can use a captcha plugin in both registration and posting a new topic.

This plugin Recaptcha2  will avoid you loosing too much time deleting spams.

[Erik Geurts]

Thanks for your suggestion. We already tried both, it doesn't help. Spam bots can get around captchas nowadays.

[eslim]

You can try than a Ip range blocking with well know spammers IP ranges.

Check from where is coming most of your spam and block all IPs.

[Erik Geurts]

We've already tried that, of course, and many other things. It simply doesn't resolve the issue completely.

[Ian]

I've put quite some time in locking out the spam bots, seems much better at the moment !