SparkFun Electronics Forum

Hey Bill and others,

I was talking to one of my coworkers here at SFE inquiring into how to limit the spammers. He mentioned that all the forums he ever joined were basically spam-fests... except for the ones he had to pay for. Hmmm.

I don't suggest we start a cover charge at the door, but is there a sensible way to keep the spammers out? The image registration image doesn't work on the humans who are paid to create spam accounts. I am thinking that we should grandfather the current 5000+ users in, but then limit new forum users to current customers of SFE that have a valid order # with SFE and a matching email address. Perhaps that is a bit too harsh so we could then offer some sort of a general entry application. Such application should entail drawing us a pretty picture of a person in a field flying a kite or some such hoop to jump through.

Does anyone have experience to making it just hard enough to enter that the spammers go elsewhere?

-Nathan

Have you looked into moving to IPB and VB for the forum? I dont see many spammers on those boards, and ive setup quite a few IPB boards and they are pretty secure.

Do you currently have email validataion in place? That helps alot.

Yes to email validation but I don't think it helps much. Anyone can get an email address anywhere.

I wonder if installing something like peerguardian on the server would block most spam people...

Im not sure if or where they exist but I think there may be packages out there for forums which block known spam IP addresses.

You could make it one account per IP address. That might limit spamming. You can do what I seen on other forums: More mods that are on more often to delete spam, and ban spammers

Whether you use phpBB, IPB, or vB doesn't really matter. People can still sign up and spam the forums. Personally, I don't like phpBB much and im starting to dislike IPB after 2.0 was released. vB seems to be a really great forums but its not free.

I also seem some forums have this system where your thread or post doesn't show up until its reviewed by a mod. Its really annoying but it does the trick.

You can also try offering non-spammers a discount maybe less people will spam? =P

Restricting it to customers would mean that people can't ask about stuff before they buy (at least, not the first time) and I think forums like this are really useful for questions like "can I use product X to do Y?".

You could charge a few dollars to post, but apply that fee towards a sparkfun purchase, and also make it refundable on request (unless you've spammed)... that would be completely fair IMHO, but would be more bookkeeping for SF.

robodude666 wrote:I also seem some forums have this system where your thread or post doesn't show up until its reviewed by a mod. Its really annoying but it does the trick.

We are active on a forum where any posts from new members are moderated and must be approved by a mod. Once the posters have their bonafides, they can post without moderation. This, of course, is a lot of work for the moderators, but keeps the spam down.

riden wrote:

robodude666 wrote:I also seem some forums have this system where your thread or post doesn't show up until its reviewed by a mod. Its really annoying but it does the trick.

We are active on a forum where any posts from new members are moderated and must be approved by a mod. Once the posters have their bonafides, they can post without moderation. This, of course, is a lot of work for the moderators, but keeps the spam down.

I've already suggested that. I use that technique for the Yahoo groups I have formed and there is zero spam. The amount of work is quite minimal - about 10 minutes a day for the LPC2000 group with over 4,000 members (50 or so joining every week) and quite a lot of posts (about 170 a week).

Leon

On the PHPBB board I administer, before deleting a spammer I create a wildcard ban for their email account's domain (for example "*@sdfsf.com"). This has cut down on spam majorly (as, sadly, has blocking "*.info" emails). They still get through on occasion, but they are quickly manually deleted and then they have to use a different email domain to register again. Most spammers only use a few domains, and they choose to go elsewhere.

I'll be happy to send you my existing wildcard list if that would help you. By the way, most of the banned domains are registered to people in Russia. Hmm...

In soviet russia spamers bot you

but any ways..
what about the idea that only people who buy something (or grandfather accounts) can post in any where they choose. And any one who hasn't bought something can only post in the 'questions' forum (untill they buy something). I think this is quite doable with current phpbb with the use of groups.

I am facing same problem on several boards. To reduce spam I used three things:

- using invite for joining the board: at least two members with 10 or more good posts can invite new member. If new member get banned, all 3 are banned.

- restricting access (to make first post in 2 days after registration)

Unfortunately, I can't show you how it works. It's in slovenian language. Anyway, you need some PHP knowledge to modify some phpBB scripts... etc.

I like the idea of moderating the posts of new users but I think we will need more moderators to keep up with demand. From what I can tell, I'm the primary person catching spam on this forum but there can be several days on end where I don't have a chance to browse around and delete it all due to my hectic work schedule. If we started moderating posts today without more active moderaters, there is a chance that legitimate posts could be held up for a few days. If that were happening to me, I would be pissed!

Is there a way to make a "Report Spam" button that could temporarily suspend an account until a moderator could check out the material? It could be abused however unless it was limited to users with a certain amount of posts.

-Bill

If we ban the word "Shakira", our spam load would probably be cut in half!

-Bill

actually, PHPBB lets you write 'word censors' so it will automatically replace words. I suggest 'porn'->'I'm an idiot', 'shakira'->'I'm an idiot spammer', 'viagra'->'please ban me', etc. At least have some fun with the spammers