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Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: jodybingo on December 10, 2011, 10:34:05 AM

Title: have a nice day
Post by: jodybingo on December 10, 2011, 10:34:05 AM

A bit of cleaning up to do on the forums??
hehe

Title: Re: have a nice day
Post by: Corey Cooper on December 10, 2011, 10:45:21 AM

The ban list is getting heavy with Chinese ISPs.  I'm afraid I'm going to end up banning all of China.

Title: Re: have a nice day
Post by: Bixby on December 11, 2011, 02:12:54 PM

Corey:

Simple Machine Forums has some plug ins that really make it so spam accounts do not sign up. Especially the spam bot accounts. I run two separate SMF sites and the plugin modules cleaned up my spam problem.

Matt (Bixby)

Title: Re: have a nice day
Post by: Corey Cooper on December 12, 2011, 12:15:42 PM

Which one?  I've looked through their plug-ins before and frankly none of the anti-spam plug-ins stand out.  I've got the Captcha plug-in, and I've modified the forum code to extend the ban on certain email patterns.

Title: Re: have a nice day
Post by: Bixby on December 12, 2011, 12:48:00 PM

Couple of things...

I upgraded both of my forums to version 2.0 of SMF. There were some features in 2.0 that allows questions to be asked on registration that prevent spammers from signing up in the first place. As bots become more sophisticated at solving Captcha, other measures were needed.

For instance, you can ask a question on registration such as:
"What game is this software primarily used for?" and if they answer anything but "poker", it will not allow the registration to proceed. That feature has been great on the forum sites I run.

The plug-in module I use is "Stop Spammer" version 2.3.9
It allows for easy checking of email and IP addresses to a database of know spammers. It has helped me prevent a couple of accounts from joining the forums.

Hope that information helps.
Cheers,
Matt (Bixby)