Constant flood of spammers

[iceybunneh]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum, so I'm sorry if I got it wrong :/

On a website I run, there's a flood of spammers that have been registering probably since last September. They're the ones that register, spam their sig with links and leave. I've added that stopforumspam.com plugin where it disallows registration if the person's email and IP address matches known spammer information, disabled sigs until a user has 10 posts, and I've banned and blocked so many IP addresses and emails. I even tried to have all new registrations be admin approved, but that proved to be too much trouble. They just keep coming back. Has anyone else had this problem? It's worse on a forum where I am a Vice Admin (that is, admin with limited access to the Admin CP) and since the main admin for that site is hardly ever online, I can't ask him if he can install a plugin or change how registration works :/

Need any advice possible, it feels like I'm drowning in spam D:

[Elitestate]

Hmmm, what forum is it? vb, mybb? try adding the forum name to the thing where it *'s out the forum name, if there using proxy's to access the site again, there should be a pluggin to block the use of proxy's..

[iceybunneh]

Sorry, I forgot to add that both forums I mentioned are on mybb. I have recently started adding URLs to the filters, but that's just another temporary fix :/ As for the proxies...I'm not sure if I want to block it. I was blocked from my own server after I couldn't remember what my own cPanel password was (stupid move) and had to use a proxy to access my site while the woman hosting the site took care of the problem.

[timestandstill]

This is usually a last resort, but consider blocking the third world countries. That's where almost all spam comes from, and ad networks pay almost nothing for their traffic.

[iceybunneh]

I do consider that a drastic move. I have an IP range from India banned after a flood of spammers from there, but I don't want to block the country. Someone very important to our site lives in India so I can't block the whole country :/ Is there a way to find what IP ranges belong to certain countries?

[GrammarPhreak]

Isn't much more that you can do, maybe try a few other things. Like blocking a whole IP range where most of the spam comes from.

[AceInfinity]

Do you even have a captcha added for the forum registration? If they are bots then that will solve the issue 90% of the time. Otherwise configure your server to block the use of proxies. It's easy to make rules for them to identify proxy servers, provided you have enough access to do so.

[+GFx]

Try seeing what email addresses they are signing up with (E.g. @hotmail @yahoo etc..) and if you see a pattern, then disallow the said email addresses.

If you need further help, PM me.

[AceInfinity]

Try seeing what email addresses they are signing up with (E.g. @hotmail @yahoo etc..) and if you see a pattern, then disallow the said email addresses.

If you need further help, PM me.

That's just a simple AdminCP configuration, just like allowing more than one rep from the same person for the same user account. But it would still be fairly easy for a bot to bypass this email verification setting.

[iceybunneh]

We have Recaptcha installed. And the majority of the email addresses are major free ones like yahoo.co.uk (I think that's the UK email? I forget D: ) and gmail. But I don't think it's a good idea to disallow gmail :/