Banned members

[Topman]

How do I ban a member WITHOUT sending them a confirmation e  mail?

Yesterday I banned three spammers and have had 30 Mailundeleivered notification e mails from "various"@"theirurl".com.

Despite my forum being down overnight I now have about 12 more spammers to ban and don't want the same e mail problem.

[Topman]

Also:  Why am I getting so many spam members regsitering when I have capcha in the registration.
Should this stop it?

[Illori]

CAPTCHA has been broken by bots for a while now, you can check the mod site for some useful anti-spam mods.

[Topman]

Which is best?   I am using SMF1.1.13

I have downloaded and am trialing the Stop Forum Spam one.

[Illori]

with version emulation you can install http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1516 many people find it more useful then some of the other anti-spam mods. you just need to be creative with the questions you ask.

[pbaxter]

Are you banning just the name or the IP? I would ban the IP

[Illori]

an ip ban is not very useful these days with dynamic ip address that change frequently

[a10]

Went trough this:
-new & naive: guest posting allowed (spam appeared immediately)
-members only posting (tons of spam registrations)
-banning tons of ip's + member approval (started to get control, but lots of work)

Current setup & no more problems:
-verification questions mod (special questions related to subject of forum)
-member approval (a quick ip check with stopforumspam.com)
-htaccess country ban cn, ru, pl, ua (keeping lots of vermin away, apparently no slowdown or problems)

[Topman]

a10gf  - I would ban you for your username!

Like you I have the stopforumspan Mod to check and this so far) has stopped the spam registrations.
I like the idea of banning countries.
How do you do this?  Is there another Mod available?

I may use the questions Mod if I keep getting problems.

[a10]

The question mod is excellent.

There are websites that generates ip lists by country. Current htaccess contains 15799 lines of ip ranges, and (by pure luck?) works fine, bot visits seems to be down by around 90%. Will not give any recommendations, a few errors and it can lock out most legit visitors and forum members, feels like playing with explosives 

[rsmini]

an excellent and usefull thread, we have the captcha mod installed and found that spammers are getting through.It must because bots have broken capthca. We have it set so we activate all new members so that saves a problem.

However it takes such a long time sifting through the list of new members and trying to decide who is ok and who is not!! a real pain. I'm going to try installing the stopforumspam mod and see if that helps.

[Topman]

It will help a bit but not stop it.  You need to set the capcha to high, (even I cant read that!)

mainly canadian Pharacuticals at the moment.  I am going to send the comapny an invoice for my admin if it gets much worse.

Unfortunatiely some idiots are manulaly registering to post links, or levae their url imbedded on the profile page and all you can do is delete them as and when.  At least if you ban the IP, username, email address etc etc they cant come back!  So I am hoping that after a few months they will ahve given up.

It seems to go in waves.  I had none when I installed the mod but have had 20 or so in the last two days!