Has anybody else noticed how our forums are getting positively flooded with spam e-mails? At the moment it feels like every day I’m banning at least one new user for spamming - any ideas why it’s happening, and is there anything we can do about it or is it just “one of those things”?
Trying to put a positive spin on it, is the amount of spam we get indicative of how popular our forums are or how prominantly they feature from a Google search, or again is it just us being unlucky?
I think it’s just us being unlucky. I do know that there are other forums that get flooded with spam as well so we’re not alone.
We already use captcha (those weird-looking numbers and letters that you have to enter when you first register for the forums), but I guess the spammers are getting smarter?
The only alternative I know to reduce the amount of spam is to approve each member one by one. I don’t think it’d be a problem, but I might have trouble differentiating who is a real person and who is a spammer.
In any event, we can try and see if that works.
I’ll also check if there are any plug-ins that help reduce spam.
Hey Manny, thanks for the response - it’s all cool, my friend, I’m quite happy to go through and just delete them manually if it’s easier, it doesn’t cause me much hardship - the biggest concern I have is if I miss any and it contains offensive content or if I can’t get on the forums for a while.
I think for approving new forum members manually one-by-one, that would actually create more work than just deleting the spam IMO, and I also think you’re right to say that it would become hard for us to tell who was “real” and who was a spammer!
Needless to say anything you’re able to do to help would be great, but it’s not a big problem IMO.
Just wanted to thank Chris for deleting all the spam threads. There are a lot of spammers of late and Chris has done a great job of removing them.
EDIT: I updated some of the settings via the admin panel. I registered for reCAPTCHA which is a human verification system that will eliminate much of the spam (at least that’s what the site says). I’ve also installed the Akismet anti-spam system that is widely used on popular sites. Lastly, I’ve made some changes on the registration to make it a little bit more trickier (but not to difficult) for new users.
Hopefully these measures should reduce the spam and give Chris a break.
I’m not sure. In any event, it might be best to soft delete the thread and PM the user (if it is a legitimate user) and ask him to create another thread? Just my two cents.
It would help if I knew what those characters meant/were - any ideas?