My Forum Post About SPAM #2

[xiongmao]

Hey Winston,

I put Cloudflare on my site but I'm disappointed with it so far, it doesn't seem to stop the most obvious of spammers.

Check out StopForumSpam as it's brilliant at identifying IP addresses associated with spammers. There might be a phpBB plugin for their service, if not it's not that hard to mod the signup page to see if an IP address is a known spammer IP. I put it on my dating site and it has a 100% record of flushing out female scammers (e.g. those from West Africa).

[Winston]

Well it seems that Cloudflare isn't really doing much to block forum spam. We still get spam everyday in the dozens. Dang. Cloudlfare is a reverse proxy, so the IP's of these spammers would be Cloudflare IP's. When I block them, I may be blocking other legit users coming from the same Cloudflare IP who are in the same region. I will contact Cloudflare support and ask them about this, and why their system is doing nothing to block spammers.

Most of the spam seems to be Russian, so they must be coming from Russia. There are ways of blocking whole countries here, so I ought to block Russia, but I would do that only as a last resort. If I block whole countries, it means normal users would not be able to view this forum, which would suck and reduce our global presence.

So better try other options first. I am still trying to figure out how to install the Google reCAPTCHA here:

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html

I also see a hack for this forum that would disable new users from posting links. Not sure if that will block the spammers though. They could just still post URL's that are not hyperlinked.

Most of the spammers lately seem to be coming from IP's starting with 162. So I've blocked all IP's starting with 162 to try to stop them.

Any suggestions?

No matter what I do, the spammers seem to be able to find a way around it. I've even added new humanizer questions such as "Is this forum more tolerant than Rooshv forum?" and "Is Happier Abroad better than PUA and MGTOW?", etc. lol. Yet those don't stop the spammers. I am wondering if these spammers are human now, and not bots.

[Winston]

Update:

Alright I just implemented the Google reCAPTCHA. All I had to do was copy and paste some security strings from my account into my forum, which was already set up for it.

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html

So it was easier than I thought. I hope that stops the spam, but I don't see how. The reCAPTCHA is just a thing on the registration page that shows two words that you have to enter to pass it. Why couldn't a bot do that? Isn't it easy? Am I missing something?

[Winston]

Btw Tsar, next time you want to talk about forum spam, do it in this thread or other threads about it here. No need to keep creating new threads about forum spam. Just keep it all in one thread so people can find it easier instead of having to read multiple threads needlessly. I will send this to your PM. Thanks.

[Winston]

Ok I understand the new Google reCAPTCHA now. It only displays easy words to humans. Bots won't see them. And it will track the user's activity to see if they are a bot or human. See Google's explanation here.

https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12 ... ptcha.html

https://security.googleblog.com/2013/10 ... ly-if.html

However, that won't stop human spammers and trolls, as droid suspected they are.

Here's a YouTube video about it.

Spammy traffic consumes resources and degrades the user experience. This has long been a problem on desktop and is even worse on mobile. CAPTCHAs have traditionally been the first line of defense for fighting automated spam and abuse. However, as spammers have grown more sophisticated, the increased complexity of CAPTCHAs can be frustrating for end users, resulting in increased drop-offs.

Google’s reCAPTCHA API has been on a mission to change this by providing an effective spam & abuse fighting tool with minimal user interaction. In this talk, we will introduce an updated UI and discuss a broad set of reCAPTCHA use cases. We give a sneak peek into the machinery behind our spam and abuse fighting, and end with a demo of how easy it is to integrate reCAPTCHA into your site or app.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-HlJyNWfoY[/youtube]

[Winston]

Well it looks like the new Google reCAPTCHA is working. Since it was implemented, there has been very few spam. The spam that did come through was likely human spam, as droid mentioned, and not hard to manage. So the spam problem appears to be fixed for now. Keep your fingers crossed.

Hope you unappreciative bastards at least give me a "thank you". :p

[Winston]

Update:

I just altered the posting file code so that new users with less than 5 posts cannot post links. Hopefully that will stop most spammers since they cannot post links.