Just messin’ with ya. But it seems like we’re getting more and more of that type of crap - is it technically possible to do what other boards do to combat this problem and have a moderator vet the first post or require a captcha to prove they’re not some type of scambot?
If it is, would it be desirable?
OK, I thought this was going to be a very confused spammer, and was all set to report you.
I don’t think that we should try to “do what other boards do” about this, since it’s a lot more common on other boards I see. I mean, I’d like to see none of that at all, so if we can improve we should, but where we are now, I don’t see it as a very high priority.
Reported.
Regards,
Shodan
All seriousness aside - it has been so long since I registered that I don’t remember the process. Does it not require a capcha (which I assume is the part where you have to re-enter a string of characters from a picture). If not, it’s too bad it’s not a feature of vBulletin.
Our latest fake documents salestroll is pretty annoying, I grant you.
Regards,
Shodan
But I want fake money!
Most spammers still have a human for such things. And some capchas are bot solvable.
I keep getting this one…
29 of The Biggest Balloons in Hollywood!
I had a look, and it’s just one of those crappy captchas where Google get you to work out street addresses for them. It looks easy enough for a computer to read it, but I’m just guessing.
How easy would it be to ban links in the first few posts?
We used to get boatloads of spam on my board (which had all the same Captchas and email validation as this one), until a user suggested a couple of plugins that pretty much stopped it all. The two key ones are StopForumSpam and Country Moderation, particularly the latter. It turns out that nearly all spam comes from a handful of countries that rarely if ever yield posters. And for those few non-spam posters, they’ll usually send you an email and you can unblock them manually.
I’d be happy to share my country block list or provide instructions on installation if anyone is interested.
I’ve seen a number of spammers who make several (not so) innocuous posts before the spamming because they expect that.
When you register you have to answer a question (there’s no image-based captcha) that is supposed to trip up spambots. And we actually do have a system that catches suspicious looking posts and holds them for review. For a while it worked great and I think it really reduced the amount of spam that made it to the board, but the programmers of the 'bots seem to have modified their technique enough that the system doesn’t work anymore. Or maybe there’s an update we can make.
Which countries?
Some of the captchas pictures are so bad I’d like to get one of those spambots to help interpret the letters for me.
Heh. I had to look up a site with country codes to figure out a few of them, and for a second I thought our second biggest spammer, not counting the US, was Vatican City.
It’s been a while since I tweaked the list, but my current whitelist is:
AF,AS,AU,BD,BT,IO,BN,KH,CX,CC,CK,TL,FJ,PF,TF,GU,HK,IN,ID,JP,KI,KP,KR,LA,MO,MY,MV,MH,YT,FM,MN,MM,NR,NP,NC,NZ,NU,NF,MP,PK,PW,PG,PH,PN,RE,WS,SG,SB,LK,TW,TH,TK,TO,TV,VU,VN,WF,AI,AQ,AG,BS,BB,BM,BV,CA,KY,DM,GD,GP,HM,JM,MW,MQ,PR,KN,LC,VC,SH,PM,TC,US,UM,VG,VI,DZ,AO,BJ,BW,BF,BI,CM,CV,CF,TD,KM,CG,CD,CI,DJ,EG,GQ,ER,ET,GA,GM,GH,GN,GW,KE,LS,LR,LY,MG,ML,MR,MU,MA,MZ,NA,NE,NG,RW,ST,SN,SC,SL,SO,ZA,SD,SZ,TZ,TG,TN,UG,EH,ZM,ZW,AR,AW,BZ,BO,BR,CL,CO,CR,CU,DO,EC,SV,FK,GF,GT,GY,HT,HN,MX,AN,NI,PA,PY,PE,GS,SR,TT,UY,VE,AX,AL,AD,AM,AT,AZ,BH,BE,BA,BG,HR,CY,CZ,DK,EE,FO,FI,FR,GE,DE,GI,GR,GL,VA,HU,IS,IR,IQ,IE,IL,IT,JO,KW,LV,LB,LI,LT,LU,MK,MT,MD,MC,MS,NL,NO,OM,PS,PL,PT,QA,RO,SM,SA,CS,SK,SI,ES,SJ,SE,CH,SY,AE,GB
So whichever country codes are missing are blocked. That answers your question, right? 
From the thread I linked, I believe I’m blocking:
Yemen, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Tajikstan, Turkey, Russian Federation, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan, China, and Belarus.
Although I probably tossed in a few of the additional ones elmwood recommended.
There is actually an image-based captcha as well as the question.
I think you drew someone here.
Looks like the #2 country for spam is the U.S. So if we ban all American accounts that should take care of a large amount of stupid posts right there!
The other vBul forum I post on has also been hit with spammers getting through the counter-measures in the last week or so, too. So yes, there’s newer and better technology out there. Giraffe’s approach will help; but Captcha is dead as a preventative IMO. You need human-answerable questions like “what relation is my father’s brother’s daughter to me?”, or “select exactly 3 dogs and 3 cats from these 25 pictures”, something like that.