Any help to beat forum spam-bots welcome

[Jake]

Hi all,

We have all the usual forum mods and hacks in place to prevent spam-bots from interrupting your experience. But at the moment we are getting (by my reckoning anyway) anywhere between 10-50 new topics started by spam-bots EVERY HOUR.

Luckily, thanks to keyword flagging, almost all of these are automatically placed in a moderation queue, so the majority of you don't ever see them. But Whenever I sign in I am greeted by pages of guff, nothing threads made by bots, I have to skip through pages and pages and occasionally pick out the odd genuine post when using the 'new posts' button.
An unpleasant consequence is any new users who start topics that contain flagged keywords are also getting put in the moderation queue, due to tedious bulk deletion of spam, some new users are not having the greatest forum experience. To them it will seem like their new topic never appears on the forum, no matter how many times they try to post it.

if anyone has any insight in this area, and can help, please drop one of us staff a pm. We have been through this before, and no doubt will do again, but it seems at the moment all of our anti spam tools are ineffective.

 

[Jake]

As a quick example to the severity of the problem, in the 17 minutes since I made this topic there have been 8 new spam topics made.

I haven't checked but it may be causing server slowdown due to mass spam account sign ups as well as constant new topic posting.

 

[ajt09]

As a quick example to the severity of the problem, in the 17 minutes since I made this topic there have been 8 new spam topics made.

I haven't checked but it may be causing server slowdown due to mass spam account sign ups as well as constant new topic posting.

I'm a mod on another forum, and it was pretty bad there too. I'll ask the site admin if there's anything that can stop spam of this scale

 

[mersk]

It's getting really annoying. How about including a confirmation upon posting, like writing the numbers shown in a pic or something? It just takes a couple of seconds to fill in, and should be able to stop the spambots.

 

[TJD07]

Spamalyser XD

Pacman face never works for me

 

[mersk]

Spamalyser

Or that.

 

[JMocks]

If this was a vBulletin forum (what I run), there's a perfect mod that prevents spam bots from registering. My site was actually overran by spam bots the first time and I had to shut it down. I found a mod on the vBulletin mod site and haven't had a single spam bot problem in over a year.