Spam Fighting (VBulletin)

[Cormac]

I have noticed a lot of new spam members on one of my vb forums so i decided to look up some spam prevention methods

Akismet Anti-Spam - vBulletin.org Forum

SpamBuster v1.0.0 (Stable): Identify, log and remove spam posts on your forum - vBulletin.org Forum

I'm going to install this one ^ now.

I saw a modification before which replaces the captcha with a simple math question like 'what is 7 - 2'. That should prevent intelligent captcha reading bots from registering.

 

[mneylon]

You mean this one:
NoSpam! - an alternative to CAPTCHA images - vBulletin.org Forum ?

 

[Cormac]

That's the one.
Available on 3.6....i must upgrade pretty soon.

 

[ph3n0m]

sorry to hijack but is there anything similiar out there for phpBB?

 

[Cormac]

sure is, but i haven't used phpbb in a while now
phpBB Antispam Mods: Anti-spam protection for phpBB

and this thread on phpbb.com
phpBB.com :: View topic - [2.0.19] AntiSpam Mod

 

[mneylon]

You could probably get bad behavior (sic) to work with both vbulletin and phpbb2 if you did a bit of work (though maybe that's already been done)

Unlike the other suggestions that I've seen bad behavior blocks them before they even get to post anything, as it does it based on UserAgent strings amongst other things...
I think I'm still using it on my blog...

 

[Cormac]

that looks very interesting michele
Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour - Homeland Stupidity

just a quick Q...do you need to edit every php file with a php includes for the bad behavior tool to work?

 

[Cormac]

Michele, what anti-spam are you using on here?
I'm getting hit very bad lately.

 

[mneylon]

The main one I'm using is this:

Check Proxy RBL on New User Registration. - vBulletin.org Forum

Makes my life infinitely easier

 

[Cormac]

That's the business!

I had askimet installed as my main anti spam protection. But for ages it wasn't working as well as it did on a old installation of vb. It was only after i installed another mod this morning that i noticed in the permissons for usergroups the following beautiful peice of text:
Filter Posts With Akismet Yes/No.

I nearly cried

So what else are you using? I installed the No Spam! mod which replaces the image verficiation with a challange but it didn't work out of the box and i never had the time to revisit it. I'm going to have to in order to solve all this crap.

 

[Cormac]

Just found a blacklist of dodgy domains from Simon Willison: Blacklisting Comment Spam which could turn out to be handy

http://simon.incutio.com/blacklist.txt
(it's from 2003 so it's probably outdated actually)


An IP based blacklist:
Alle Blogs - Spammers go away!
(seems to be from late 2005)

 

[mneylon]

An IP based blacklist:
Alle Blogs - Spammers go away!
(seems to be from late 2005)

If you use SpamHaus-XBL there won't be a huge difference, as it contains CBL and other data