Topic: Spammer Rampage; Reducing the Impact

[Rivet]

Howdy all.

I have sort of a general question about making it harder for spammers to go about their shenanigans.  I have the regular settings installed with Captcha, banned nasty domains, etc.  We have good mods that patrol the site and delete their nonsense.  However, the last week or so, we've had waves of spammers come our way.

Anywho, anyone have some tips on slowing down the spammage?  I know totally eliminating it isn't going to happen, we're just trying to reduce the workload on mods and the amount that shows up.

Thanks.

[shamun]

Save your users the frustration and remove the captcha.  Bots right now break SMFs captchas with a 70-100% success rate.  If you're deadset on a captcha, go with reCaptcha where the bots have to pay a company to solve it.  Bots will still get past that (its only like .006 per captcha) so it still doesnt help if your a high rank site.

Stopping spammers would be best done by:
Using mods that integrate with 3rd party anti-spam lists like httpbl.
Use questions instead of captcha and make it relevent to your site (such as a color in a specific place, a word etc)
Possibly use cloudflare.  They have many proxies on a blacklist so it reduces the available IPs able to spam you.

[Doctor Deejay]

Save your users the frustration and remove the captcha.

Indeed, captcha has been broken a long time ago so it doesn't make sense to use it. You should use verification questions instead and replace those questions every 3 weeks or so.

[Rivet]

Thank you both for the great info.  If Captcha doesn't work, I will dump it.

Is there a recommended mod for the anti-spam list integration (looks like this one would work)?

I am not familiar with Cloudflare, but will do some research today.

Thanks again.  I appreciate the help.

[Kindred]

I use questions, stop spammer (with an account on stopforumspam) and bad behavior+httpBL (with an account on project honeypot)

[Rivet]

Thanks for the info, Kindred.

[Rivet]

Just sort of a follow up.  I have Bad Behavior mod installed, questions in place of Captcha, and CloudFlare setup.  It has reduced the spammage a good amount, but not completely eliminated it of course.  Its not stopping the human spammers, but the bots are way down.

One weird thing with CloudFlare was a common search term to find our site usually resulted in us being the 3-4th listing on Google.  Within 24-hours of the DNS change, we plummeted many, many pages down the list.  My host tells me this is common with an initial roll over to CloudFlare and to give it a little time.  CloudFlare positively swears its an amazing coincidence.  Anyone else experience this?  Which is correct? 

Thanks much.

[K@]

I found this helps at my place.

http://english-141849232970.spampoison.com

Hip-hop version:

http://hiphop-110940277947.spampoison.com

[Rivet]

These links will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists practically useless and of no commercial value.

LOL!