Spammers

[ThaJunkYardMan]

today i have had a load of spammers on my site post porn,links, drugg offers lol

these bots are registering, changing their siggy, changing avatar, posting in random forums and all have different ips.

what the best way to stop this?

i have been online all day just deleting these posts ect.

[Ehren]

Yeah - this site was spammed, and so was my photoshop tutorial site (and my brothers site was also spammed).

Seems like it's a mass spamming massacre on IPB forums.

To block them follow these steps:

1. Login to your admin cpanel

2. Management tab

3. Custom profile fields (from left menu)

4. Add new field

5. Field title: Bot control

Description: Please enter "123abc" into the following field to prove you are not a bot.

Field type: Text input

Max input: 6

Expected input format: nnnaaa

Include on register page? Yes

Field MUST be completed? Yes

The fields I didn't mention can be left as default.

Press "Add field" at the bottom, and you'll be good. The above steps add a form to the register page which requires a specific input (number, number, number, letter, letter, letter). If it's incorrect, the form won't submit. Keep in mind, it's still possible that the bot can get in if it enters the right input (even though the chances are probably less than 1%).

[ThaJunkYardMan]

done thanks.

yea i know they were joining by the time i deleted the posts and banned the user.

thanks alot.

now i can get back to what i was doing

[ThaJunkYardMan]

haha. just as this has happened ips has fixed it. ur rss will pick up the story soon

[Stars25]

Happening on my skinning forum also.

[Bitter]

That fix doesn't work for me. I've tried it as well as AndyF's method as well, none work. The IPS spam protection fix doesn't work for me either. Bots keep registering constantly. I contacted IPS and gave them an account to check my ACP. We shall see what they figure out I suppose.

Bitter.

[Bitter]

Sorry for the double post, but after speaking with IPS support for quite some time, they were able to confirm that the staff will work on a solution to this and release a permanent fix hopefully by tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. I will post an update if I get more information.

Bitter.

[W_Williamson]

I have had this problem aswell. I installed this mod

http://invisionmodding.com/index.php?autoc...mp;showfile=784

Has worked for me so far

[ThaJunkYardMan]

the file edit and the custom profile worked for me

[Pride]

Thanks for your post Ehren! You're the best (Y)

[MauriceKNK]

You can set it so that they can only use like user@theirdomain.com or user@comcast.net etc

Just block free emails, it may anger some people but it will pretty much end spam

[b34nz]

What about removing "powered by ipb" form the footer of your forum? That's what they use to search with Google like this: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&amp...Search&aq=f

[Ehren]

You're not allowed to unless you purchase copyright removal.

Just add the custom profile field and it stops them all. Otherwise, 2.3.6 also fixes them

[scottlpool2003]

Using just expected type "nnnaaa" would that not mean they could enter "999uuu" ?

[Ehren]

Yes - but bots don't know that. They'd enter any text inside that, and 99% of the time would be denied as it wouldnt be nnnaaa.

[scottlpool2003]

There's a system available that logs spam email addresses from all types of forums in a central database and blocks them from registering. I don't know what it's called but it does work.

[Trancehed]

Before 3.0 came out I would check all new accounts against http://www.stopforumspam.com/ and they pretty much caught them all. Haven't had any spammers since 3.0 though.