Topic: Why Do They Spam

[Mr. Peanut]

I have a forum that is both new and poorly noticed.

Yet, I get a good deal of spam but its not for the purpose of selling anything. Its just jibberish to clutter my site. How could these spammers possibly benefit from this?

Mr. Peanut
funlanta (dot) com

[Arantor]

That's the thing, they do benefit from it - otherwise they wouldn't do it.

There's two reasons, really, and they're sort of interlinked.

Firstly, all the extra links back to a site boost its ranking in Google etc. Secondly, it doesn't take many people to pay for whatever dubious service is on offer for it actually to be profitable; the cost of running a bot to spam hundreds and hundreds of forums is surprisingly low, so it only really needs a few people and they pay for (with profit) all the thousands of forums that get spammed.

[Mr. Peanut]

Okay, thanks for the feedback. I'm a rooky at this.

If anyone sees room for improvement at funlanta(dot)com, your input is greatly appreciated!

Mr. Peanut

[MovedGoalPosts]

You'll probably never get completely rid of spammers but there are some things to try that means only the persistent human is likely to break through.

Catchpa systems on registration have frequently been broken by bots.  They won't keep the spammer accounts out.  Try setting some verification questions in the admin > configuration > security and moderation.  I have a set of about 10 with the forum set to choose any 2 at random.  Simple questions like "what is 2 + 5" (7) or what is the missing letter in "funla*ta" (n) work best as they struggle to get the bots to know which ones come up so it will usually be a human that registers.

Consider also adding mods such as the bad-behaviour: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2502.

Without these measures I could get a couple of registrations a day.  Now it's a couple of registrations a month. 

[Arantor]

I wouldn't use math questions at all. Not only do some people seem to have trouble with it (and won't be told why not, e.g. I know forum who had 5 - 8 = ? as the question, the answer of course being -3, but there was this one guy who got frustrated over and over because 3 wasn't working, though of course the answer isn't 3, it's -3, and even when we told him this he still kept trying 3 not -3), math questions are also incredibly easy to break.

As a rule, anything you can plug into Google as a question and get the answer back is a question you should avoid like the plague.

[Xenocidius]

I prefer to use questions relevant to the subject of your forum - ones that visitors will know the answer to but that spambots or even humans employed to register spambots won't. For example, my forum is about a card game called Elements. The registration question is: "How many elements are there?" Any player of the game will know the answer, but no one else will. Also, Googling the question gives answers like 118.

[choloman05]

They're getting much smarter too so be careful. Sometimes they're not just looking for link juice, but trying to hijack your site, stuff like that.