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How to stop forum spam ?

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ecaradec:
I run a forum at work and we are constantly spammed, I've put a recaptcha, but still got a lot of annoying messages. DC is almost free of any spam, I've never seen one actually, so I was wondering how you guys handle it ? If you can't publicly explain the measures, I'll be happy to learn about that in PM if you have special tricks. I promise to use this for goods.

eleman:
I don't know how they do that but spam messages get immediately deleted as far as I understand, but not before the notification system sends a notification about the new topic, if you have that board on the notification list.

tomos:
I think it's just that it's so active here - I've ofen seen (& reported) spammy posts, even if I dont report they seem to get removed pretty quickly.

I thought this (ways of avoiding spam) was discussed here lately but could only find this about "StopForumSpam"
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=26942.0

StopForumSpam works, and is a very useful service  :up:
-mouser (June 03, 2011, 12:26 PM)
--- End quote ---

app103:
Forum member Wordzilla made a little tool awhile back that some of us moderators use to keep an eye on the forum. We see each and every post made within seconds and can quickly click the link to the profile from it and ban any spammers.

In the event that nobody running this app is at their computer and paying attention, the feed is posted by mouser's IRC bot into our IRC channel and anyone noticing any spam through there usually alerts a moderator by typing the word "spam" repeatedly till someone in the channel goes and deletes it.  ;D

Moderators also get email alerts when new members make a post, and we get alerts whenever anyone edits an existing post (some spammers will come back a month later and add their spammy links to what otherwise would have been an innocent looking post).

Mouser has also modified the forum slightly to make it less attractive to spammers, including nofollow links in posts made by new members, no signatures for new members, and no profile info visible on new members (we got tired of cleaning up profile spam on people that register just to make a profile of spammy links and never making any posts)

If you would like to see just how much post spam DC really gets, take a look at my commenting history on WOT, where reporting forum spammers has gained me gold member status: http://www.mywot.com/en/user/148822/comments

jgpaiva:
I help with deleting spam, but mostly on reported posts, and clearly not enough to contain the hordes of spam that charge against DC every day. I'd say it's mostly mouser (who never sleeps, BTW) that has a direct brain-to-server connection and scans every new post on DC. I (and the few other people who can delete posts) only delete those who escape his sight because his cat distracts him :P

[damn, app beat me to it with a better explanation :P ]

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