Dealing with Spam

[aviator3230]

Hi All,

I set up a forum for a website I've had up for a while. Since doing so I've started getting emails from some "MAILER-DAEMON@"etc, etc
with the subject line "failure notice". I'm getting dozens of these sorts of notifications.

Is this the result of some sort of automated attempt to create links, is it an attack on the forum? I'm sure others have encountered this. I'm getting dozens of these things each day, and the site doesn't get that much traffic to start with. I can't imagine what it would be like if it was a really popular site.

Any ideas? How should I deal with this?

Thanks in advance-

[Illori]

sounds like someone is trying to send emails from your website [somehow] and the address they are sending them to does not exist. which version of smf are you running?

[aviator3230]

Hi there,

I'm running version 1.1.11

I've set the forum so that I have to approve new members - it's just that I'm getting dozens per day (and the forum is only a few days old) and it's time consuming to go through the list to delete the ones that look bogus - and of course I might accidentally delete a real person.

The userenames are usually gobbledygook and don't look like real names.

I've looked over some of the anti-spam measures and even downloaded a version of reCAPTCHA - but can't figure out how to install it. What I see on my admin page doesn't line up with the instructions. As well, I want to be careful how to get it from my computer out to the forum - I'm pretty green at this and don't want to screw up anything.

Thanks for any help you can give!

[Michael McNamara]

I would recommend you look at StopForumSpam, they have a great solution that catches 90% of the SPAM bots. There's a modification available for SMF which you can easily load and be up and running within minutes (assuming you're using the default theme).

The problem is that reCAPTCHA isn't really effective anymore since SPAMMERS now pay humans to decode them.

Cheers!

[dWhite]

The problem is that reCAPTCHA isn't really effective anymore since SPAMMERS now pay humans to decode them.

Maybe so, but it still stops the actual bots dead in their tracks since they can't break it. While there is an increasing amount of humans doing part of the work, there is still more actual "bots" than humans so reCAPTCHA is still useful to keep around on a forum.

And besides, reCAPTCHA can be extremely hard to read for humans at times.

[Arantor]

The success rate of bots on reCAPTCHA is estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 20% these days - but the human success rate is only about 50% anyway.

In any case, the main vulnerability in reCAPTCHA isn't the writing, it's the audio...

[DarkBlizz]

You could try adding custom security questions in addition to reCAPTCHA images.