Taking a bite out of forum spam

[Chris]

I've started recording every blatant (automated) forum spammers email & ip address. It is worth banning emails in addition to IPs because the automated ones need to be able to automatically check the email for the activation number and so they only work with certain email clients.

In vbulletin go to vb options, user banning options, and add these lists. There may be duplicates, but who cares.

If anyone wants to contribute their lists, that'd be nice too.

Again, these are only blatant automated spammers, not just someone who didn't know the rules.

First, ips

64.246.18.25 66.98.212.79 83.143.76.42 69.31.86.141 59.171.150.190 213.42.2.11 66.235.184.173 88.224.157.101 200.180.161.143 201.24.229.118 211.200.201.36 201.34.192.77 80.117.217.252 74.129.128.106 200.117.47.7 210.91.29.208 67.87.32.239 66.36.241.181 72.232.199.234 61.90.228.106 212.150.97.114 201.248.150.194 62.56.141.175 202.83.206.37 85.12.63.31 83.229.90.79 83.57.117.235 60.220.91.113 84.19.188.16 201.43.19.223 221.170.152.61 193.219.221.73 67.53.8.135 222.7.193.38 62.150.35.230 85.140.129.218 200.209.174.214 210.147.221.46 216.32.65.26

emails

waxslaapaas.com .ru fromru.com cashette.com res8.info topvideogalerz.info gawab.com topadult20.info laapqas bestfreemall.info inmail24.com web.de mail.info res3.info search.info ukr.net bestboyfilms.org best-ringtones-online.info gawab sanaa.cc mail.ru cashette.com .ru nakedworld fromru.com bestfreemall.info res6.info web.de nudists mail333 freemail.info bestboyfilms.org hush.com bonbon.net pokushai.org freepochta.info mediciness.net freepochta.info

[KLB]

Hey thanks. I'm a little reluctant to ban in some of my forums based on country codes as legitimate users do come from those countries.

Ironically I had previously banned mail.ru from one of my forums even though my mother-in-law uses mail.ru because it was highly unlikely to get a legitimate user to that forum from a mail.ru account and I had been repeatedly spammed from that mail service.

[joeychgo]

I have been working on reducing spam on my forums for some time, and I seem to have found a method of virtually eliminating spam from vBulletin forums... I wrote a tutorial on explaining how to do this.

[How To] Reduce spam on your forum

Its been working for me and I have cut spam down to nearly -ZERO- on my forums.

[Chris]

I've taken to banning all .info TLDs on some forums.

Basically, only a webmaster I figure would have a .info TLD, but most spammers do since the domains are cheap, and so on any forum except this one it is safe to ban.

[Chris]

got a new email to ban

"allthespam@"

The spammers keep using it on a different domain, but that is the normal user @ the domain.

[Chris]

New spammer... remember dev_tej_kohji or whatever? Another one I've found

mikegladsz

ip 209.85.60.92
email host: runbox.com

Ban both of those. Check your forums, I bet he is already registered.

[KLB]

I've gotten to the point that I created a new user group called just joined and all new members get dumped into it until the have been members for a period of time and have a certain number of posts. All posts by members of this group go into a moderation que and must be manually approved. I can manually promote a user out of this probationary user group if it is obvious to me that they aren't a spammer. I'm still getting flooded by spam, but none of it is getting displayed on my forum. It doesn't take much to do a recent post search and check off all the spam and delete it. Banning the spammers take a bit longer but I'm getting faster at it. I wish there was a mass ban option.

[Chris]

I'm getting to the point when I'll autoban more entire countires. Most of south america is on the chopping block since thats the new spam heavy location it seems.

[KLB]

I'm finding that over 95% of first time posts are spam on my SimCity forum.

[Masetek]

My forum spam has reduced down to pretty much nothing after installing this

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showt...=register+spam

[Chris]

There is an easier version of that Damien, one you can do without installing a plugin.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205214

It isn't exactly the same, but it is close.

[KLB]

It Looks like it is time to upgrade to vB 3.64

Man I hate doing vB updates.

[Masetek]

There is an easier version of that Damien, one you can do without installing a plugin.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205214

It isn't exactly the same, but it is close.

That's a good way of doing it

[Chris]

Alright, I've had some problems with spambots abusing a send to a friend script. So I setup a trap and recorded all their IPs and useragents for the past 2 days. I don't know if these is a network of infected slave machines, or what, but all of these IP addresses were trying to abuse my forum to send spam.

163.15.220.202
195.175.37.6
195.175.37.71
195.175.37.8
200.88.125.9
200.88.223.99
203.144.143.3
203.144.143.2
203.144.144.163
203.144.144.164
203.144.160.246
203.144.160.247
203.144.160.248
203.144.160.249
203.144.160.250
203.144.160.251
203.160.1.42
212.138.64.171
212.138.64.172
212.138.64.173
212.138.64.174
212.138.64.175
212.138.64.176
212.138.64.179
212.138.64.180
212.166.64.6
221.128.125.133
58.216.243.2
61.6.39.139
61.6.47.6
62.150.130.26
62.150.40.142
69.88.144.162
80.227.0.153
80.227.0.156
82.114.68.194

[tommy_boy]

I wonder how much if any this has to do with the increase in spam lately... botmaster.net/more1/