Cleaning up the spammers

[dbishopbliss]

I've installed some new anti-spam software, so hopefully we will have fewer (if any) spam posts.

I've also gone through the members list and banned any user that I thought looked like a spammer.  What does a spammer look like?  Here's the criteria I used:

* email was either *.ru or gmail.com
* user had spent less that one minute on the site
* user had link to a commercial site that had nothing to do with audio as the signature

I apologize in advance if I banned someone that I should not have.

David

[Wardsweb]

Thanks - I know what an ongoing battle spammers are and how much work is involved.

[Air]

Thanks, this forum is a bright spot in the day for many of us. Your endeavors are appreciated. - Chuck

[Geek]

Hi,

As a SMF owner, that first listed criteria won't work (1/2 of my tube geek members use gmail, some eastern ones use mail.ru)

Admin approval is the only tried and true way. Run the username and/or IP address through Google. If they don't show up on stopforumspam.com or Project Honeypot and Google doesn't return 1,000+ results for the IP or username, good chance it's legit :-)

Just my twonie.

Cheers!

[dbishopbliss]

I and-ed the criteria.  There are many users on this board that have legitimate gmail addresses, myself included.  But if the account had a gmail address and was linking to a site selling enhancing drugs, or adult movies, I am pretty confident that it was ok for me to ban them.  :-)

[Doc B.]

I don't know that the same criteria necessarily apply for every forum. We have 335 members after just five weeks and only 1000 posts. We see spammers every day here, enough to be time consuming to dick around with. On my other SMF forum that has been up for about three years we have around 780 members with about 7300 posts, and yet we seldom have spammers. I think part of the issue is that Bottlehead has been around on the web for close to 13 years now.

[JC]

A little OT, but same question as the other day:  The stats at the bottom of the home page say 335 members, but the Members page says 300.  Does this indicate that there are members who do not appear on the Members page?

[Grainger49]

This should be the thread for this question.  When I sign on in the morning, sometimes at 5:00 EST, should I report a spam to the moderator using the hot key for that?

[dbishopbliss]

Go ahead and report them although I generally see them as well. 

I got a spam notice this morning (grrr), but then figured out that I created a ban-entry for the user, but didn't actually block him from logging in (doh!).  I have since gone through and re-checked all the users I banned and have gone one step further and actually removed their accounts. 

The real test will be to see if we get spam from users that register after I put in the changes.