Spam

[Mart]

Can we close the site door a bit tighter, so to speak, as I've been deleting Spambot cr8p galore these past couple of weeks.

Another 2 'bots' just deleted & banned in the last 5 minutes...

[Bigfoot]

I take it these spam are people who have created an account manually as there is a picture box to type the word in, can this be done on first post as well to see if it stops these or agree to terms before posting where it does a count down which I have seen on some forums.

[Mart]

Pass.

All I know it's a load of gibberish (literally) that gets posted, but only on 'General Chat' threads.

[andybond]

I take it these spam are people who have created an account manually as there is a picture box to type the word in, can this be done on first post as well to see if it stops these or agree to terms before posting where it does a count down which I have seen on some forums.

No - its some ninja clever bots ( seriously ! )

I have a tight hold of it over on 21toc.com

I think Ian has been working hard at getting the vbulletin software updated and then its easier in the newer versions.

[D4WNO]

I know, it's a massive pain in the arse, I'm banning them every day also. I've mentioned it on the CM forum but it's only really Scoff who can do anything about it and he's crazy busy at the moment :(

[Phoenix Autosport]

on one forum i used to use the moderators/admin manualy approved new sign-ups, when signing up to the forum new members were told to post an introduction in the introduce yourself thread covering who you are, where you are and a brief history of your interest in the marque as part of the approval process, this was then checked by admin prior to approval, untill approved new members could only post in that thread.

it was by no means a fullproof solution but it did seem to stop there being any spam in all but that intro thread thread as the spamers couldnt be bothered to write a convincing introduction, they just want to leave it to clever software and monitoring that one thread for spam and on the rare occasion a bot signed up deleting posts/banning unverified users just in there was a much easier task

[Ian S]

I've not made any progress. The man who got the site fully working on his server is too busy to have the 2 or 3 hours to secure and switch on the server for us to use for fault correcting and development.

He made a great start. But then stopped. It's always the same. He's already paid nearly £80k a year for his programming so he not much interested in our money.

Been waiting 2 months for him to just do this small extra thing. Spoke to him two weeks ago and he was going to have it done by last week. Nope.

The idea is that then developers can have full access and if they make a big mess then that does not affect this live working site. We just delete the mess and start again, no new data, posts, photos, are lost.

[andybond]

Pure frustration Ian !

Feel for you here mate.

[Ian S]

Yes, it is very frustrating.

I did find in vBulletin the way to switch on full moderation of new posts. But that would mean some or all admins would have to read though and approve, or delete, every one of them, maybe 400 a year genuine as well as the spam ones.