spammed forums?

[moonlit]

It's likely to be bots, spammers don't tend to go to each forum and post by hand, it's particularly inefficient when you can have bots do it for you.

[VaKo]

It sucks to be them... But come on, there are 4 billion IP addresses, not overly like its going to happen. When I ban someone I ban the IP address, email address, display name and user name. Normally most spam bots don't get past user registration (in this case there was a weakness that was addressed in a update), normally the spammers who do get in are actual people pushing buttons. These spammers aren't ones that can be dealt with automatically.

On the last forums I setup a few things which limited this, users 1st posts could not contain a link and certain sites/words were blacklisted. This stopped 99% of human spammers who gave up and went elsewhere. Hopefully something along these lines could be setup, and somewhere I have a list of a mod or 2 that could do this.

Lastly, spam isn't a huge issue here, hasn't been for years. Any spam that does get posted gets deleted within hours, usually minutes and the user accounts responsible are banned.

[Gianluca]

but what happen when a innocent person gets that banned dynamic IP from their ISP, then they would feel that they were banned for no reason from the forums

the chances of this are very low. It's far more likely to be run over by car in a sunny day :)

this holds because (you must have the same ISP of the spammer's one) AND (you must be an hak5 fan) AND (you must log in on the same day) AND (you must be very unlucky :))

However you're right, IP ban is the last resort when fighting spammers. Indeed, I've always logged in forums without any problem.

[Steve8x]

Well I recently created an account on backtrack3 forums. (I had a question to ask) To my surprise, My posts weren't showing up and when I made a post it would say waiting for moderator approval before post shows up. Then I read one of the stickies, and it said that new accounts can't make posts without approval for 3 days due to spam. Also until you have at least 15 posts, you cannot post clickable links (of course you can bypass the filter by putting spaces and what not but the link at least wont be clickable).

So although I did find it annoying that I couldn't post without waiting for mod approval or waiting three days. I guess it still does help them prevent spam, so you may want to consider something like that. I ending up figuring out the answer to my own question since it was urgent and I couldn't wait the three days for an answer.

Anyways I'm glad I missed out on the spam and didn't see it ;)

[tactix]

some measures are a small price to pay i suppose certainly the 3 day approval even though it does make more work for the mods

[Razor512]

for me, the mod approval thing is not too good to do. it puts a crap load of monotonous work on the mods, this will make this less willing to spend time on the forums

is specially when only 1 in 500 messages will be spam