As I'm the admin of a popular Infopop message board but not a techie, I have a question about the new generation of Spammers who are making my life hell. ( I also understand that many message boards are suffering the same fate )

For the last year, we've been Spammed 5 or 6 times a day from (mostly Asia and Russia) Either Bots or humans are registering on our board simply to shill their websites. We DID have a live link in our members Profile area and the Spammers really took advantage of it.. so I removed that option. But the Spammers dont seem to care. I'm assuming that Bots are involved in many of the sign-ups because the repeat themselves in some of the personal info forms. The reason I wound-up here is because your link appears on the Infopop main page for some reason.

Does anyone know how to somehow slow down the onslaught of message board Spammers?

Thanks!

We're one of the community spotlight members, along with a couple hundred other sites. We're not directly, or indirectly for that matter, affiliated with Infopop/Groupee; however I do provide support at http://www.ubbcentral.com which is where this should be posted.

Your best bet is to upgrade to UBB.Threads7 (liek we did) this halted the majority of the 4-12 daily spambot signups and the majority of postings.

In UBB.Threads 7.1 Rick will be introducing several CAPTCHA options for human identification to help decrease bots as well.

Yeah, I used to have that problem on my forum.

Captcha is good for bots but a lot of mine were humans signing up and posting I just had to delete the posts and bear with it.

You could however setup some code to block people from the areas you are being spammed from. This could stop you from having genuine people from those countries coming to your site so i would only recommend this is a last resort.

Email Verification and a Captcha tend to stop most bots; the rest are humans and generally easy to purge.

Look in your log files for the client info. Ban bots that are making the posts via .htaccess

Captcha has a few draw backs as I covered in UBB dev's board. Human spammers are easy enough. Ban their IP range for a few days.

A couple years ago I created a script that if a user opens it they were banned via .htaccess. This is helpful in that you can put up a link even a hidden link and most bots will click it and get banned.

Just make sure you follow googles no follow meta crap so you do not ban good bots. You could also set up approval before new members are allowed to post. This increases your work load, but ensures good members.

As for captcha I am more in favor of a human intelligence design. Captcha essentially blocks any visually impair person from your site. But if I said "tell me the color of the sky"... Every human knows to answer blue. Sure bots can be taught to answer particular questions, then you change the questions and answers. Till AI is perfected this is a good I think best solution to stop bots.

I actually have a bottrap here for php pages; i'm going to be integrating it into the forum sometime ;).

I'm pulling for broadening of the captcha for ubb, I want an auditory captcha integrated as well...

There are security issues with audio. Plus what about the def and blind? Yes there are brail screens.

I know there are ;)... And I haven't really given thought to deaf/blind YET; but we'll always run a captcha here, it'll thwart bots and that's the issue for us. They can always contact me through the address on the domain whois if they'd like to register and are deaf/blind and can't get through the captcha