The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

Wow, did we ever get hit.

163 posts between 3 and 4 am...

I didn't have the patience to count them.

Wonder if it would do any good to set the forums so that someone has to have a certain amount of posts, say five or ten, before they can start a new thread.  Of course, that would limit new people who's first post is asking questions in a new thread.

Or move to a format that is less condusive to spam bots, like vBulletin.

I don't know, I've seen some pretty bad spam on vBulletin as well. 

Wasn't difficult to do RA, I didn't have to count.

Just opened up the spammers profile and it tells you total post count.

 ;D

Need to put a Captcha plugin as a requirement to register.  The bots have not been able to break that.  At least not that I'm aware of.  I'm pretty sure SMF 1.1.x has a plugin readily available for it.

EDIT: scratch the above; I notice it already uses a visual verification.  Guess you just have to manually register and then flood it.  Still requires human intervention.

Might be a good idea to institute a flood policy.

Agreed.  Not a BB system on the Internets that is NOT going to be subject to spambots.  If you register manually, what stops you from posting 163 posts in an hour.  vBulletin won't unless you institute a flood policy.

That is why I suggested a minimum post amount before starting a thread.  While they could just as easily spam on 10 different threads so they could then start a thread, most bots are set up to start new threads, so it would mean a little bit more work for the person running the bot.  And the majority of the spammers on here tend to not make it past five posts.

Of course I like the option of grabbing their IP, reverse hacking them, and spamming their computer to the point of it being non operational.  But that's not as easy as it once was... um.. I mean I have no clue how to do anything like that.

I guess I got up too early this morning.  That should have been obvious to the most casual observer.

It wasn't me man. I was home alone the whole time...I mean...I was at the movies, yeah, that's it.

Supposedly, certain porn sites also run by spammers use image captchas at login fed back from their spam bots as a way of getting real humans to solve the captcha for them. I've seen forums recently that require you to solve a captcha image and an arithmetic problem to get around this.

As with everything related to spammers, it's a cat and mouse game.

We use captcha and email verification which blocks most everyone. Only real people get through. The last spammer we had before this one was actually logging in from TCC. Luckily I deleting the posts is easier than creating them.

We bought vbulletin but the upgrade program from the old board (snitz) was a nightmare. It required to you to upgrade to phpBB or SMF and THEN upgrade to vbulletin. The process would also scramble every single password. Not to mentioned vBulletin is an annual fee and is almost identical in feature sets to SMF which is free.

All things considered, we have been relatively SPAM free.

Yup.  SMF is WAY better in that it is free (and open source in this instance means authors are free to create pretty nifty plugins).

+1 to SMF vB would not fix the spam problem at all.