Forum link spammers

[dylan]

Still getting lots of link spammers joining the forums. I'm going to implement some countermeasures to try and crack down on this over the next week or so and delete any accounts that haven't posted that are over a couple of months old.

Just a quick heads up.

[Scotty]

Wise move, no point having them account usernames unavailble to possible valid contributing new members.

[stormy]

Agreed, is there no other verification stuff that can be put in place? Are they actual spam bots auto creating accounts or people sat there pluging in the details?

[Hígh Treason]

I agree with removing these accounts, I've seen such things get out of hand if they are left alone.

@stormy - usually a human will register the account, beyond that a bot will take over, or at least, in my experience.

[dylan]

We're using reCAPTCHA for account registration, but as High Treason points out, it's humans registering these accounts.

I'm going to try out a plugin that picks out potential spammers and sticks them into a moderation queue.

[miken]

Restrict to UK IP address's

[David]

Also consider blocking throwaway mail accounts like hotmail etc

[The Dominator]

wow, i have just popped onto the admin panel and removed 4 pages of crappy accounts. 
Its hard to restrict from throwaway accounts (hotmail, gmail, etc) as they are used by nearly everyone (me included!)

The IP address is pretty reliable though, we will look at restricting to UK only.
Ta for suggestions so far

[dylan]

Unfortunately restricting to UK IP addresses would prevent some search engines from indexing the site.

[miken]

With restricting IP address,
There are a few ways you could do it.

Firstly I wouldn't block access to every page, just the http://karooforums.net/index.php?***action=register then you wont be blocking google etc.

Could do that using http://www.maxmind.com/app/mod_geoip and mod_rewrite


You could edit the page action=register loads adding ip2location api.

[The Dominator]

I like this idea

[Hígh Treason]

The moderation queue is an idea, how about if the system could put any acount that does not have a Karoo e-mail address in there? I doubt that any spammer would have the patience to start a mail account with KC, they would just move on to another forum. Unfortunately I don't know if there is anything capable of this.

Just as long as it doesn't get as bad as some other forum I went on where you had to answer 50 questions and be approved by three admins before you could log in.

Miken's idea is quite good too.

[dylan]

With restricting IP address,
There are a few ways you could do it.

Firstly I wouldn't block access to every page, just the http://karooforums.net/index.php?***action=register then you wont be blocking google etc.

Could do that using http://www.maxmind.com/app/mod_geoip and mod_rewrite


You could edit the page action=register loads adding ip2location api.

Smart ass   I'll take a look at it. This seems like a good idea!

[dylan]

I did try adding the geoip apache mod and put the following in the karooforums .htaccess file...

Code:

GeoIPEnable On
GeoIPDBFile */*/*/GeoIP.dat
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(CN|RU|US)$
RewriteRule ^index.php?action=register$ http://www.karooforums.net/blocked.php$

All it seemed to do was make the web server run really badly.

Any ideas?

[miken]

I'll play around with it will have to install apache on windows since I don't use it on my server.

Edit: don't like the instructions for setting up on windows gonna install in ubuntu in virtualbox