Anti Spam defences upgraded again...

[sjr4x4]

As this forum motors through it's second year, we have a fantastic community that is growing nicely.

Unfortunately, as we grow, we seem to invite ever more spam, so it's time to upgrade our defences again.

I've been looking at various solutions, including extreme ones such as blocking whole Country wide IP blocks, but this is unfair to any genuine users.

So I've signed up with the good folks at Stop Forum Spam and any new signups are now compared against their spam database of known usernames, email addresses and IP addresses.

As with any more extreme anti spam measures, there are always a few innocents caught in the crossfire, so if anyone has been banned or refused a sign up on My Local Forums, simply contact us and plead your case

Hmmm, 5 minutes after switching it on, it already shows 2 spammers that have been refused membership...

Hopefully this will bring an end to the plague of "great information" "good post" "me low paid link dumping forum monkey" type posts...

[CareersPartnershipUK]

Bet you they come to me! The top spammers on my site seem very keen to sell fake designer handbags .....

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by CareersPartnershipUK

Bet you they come to me! The top spammers on my site seem very keen to sell fake designer handbags .....

Makes a change from SEO monkeys! 64 blocked sign ups since 14.00 today... scary stuff!

[Dreamraven]

Hmmm, this might be a good idea for one of the other forums I'm helping with. This poor forum has been attacked left, right, and center and every morning I log in, I can see that someone's taken advantage. I've even had the pleasure of deleting and banning a few Xrumer tests. But that's only because the genius decided to create a username depicting that it was... an Xrumer test.

I think, because Google's cracking down, they now have to find all sorts of other ways to make money the easy way.

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by Dreamraven

Hmmm, this might be a good idea for one of the other forums I'm helping with. This poor forum has been attacked left, right, and center and every morning I log in, I can see that someone's taken advantage.

Well I'm very impressed so far, in the 24 hours since I switched it on, it's stopped 189 attempts. Interesting as a lot of them are the same IP but trying lots of different email accounts.

Not a complete solution, but with captcha's and questions, it certainly goes a long way!

[Dreamraven]

Originally Posted by sjr4x4

Well I'm very impressed so far, in the 24 hours since I switched it on, it's stopped 189 attempts. Interesting as a lot of them are the same IP but trying lots of different email accounts.

Not a complete solution, but with captcha's and questions, it certainly goes a long way!

Hmmm, I think so. It's really easy to get more than one email address... and from what I hear, gmail has a tiny glitch where you can log into a forum using multiple versions of the same account, simply because it doesn't 'read' punctuation marks in an email address. I haven't tested this yet though, but I have heard a good few people talking about it.