Fighting Forum Spam - Excellent Article by Brian Turner

[Juan Muriente]

Found this excellent article by Brian on minimizing forum spam, specifically suited for vBulletin:
How to fight forum spamming - Security Watch

[LPH2005]

Thank you for the link to the article! Since forum spamming is bad on my sites, this article was particularly useful. I changed the editing time and added the censorship values.

[rmjvol]

Nice article. Thanks.

I've been testing Spambuster 1.0 at one forum and it's promising. There are several tweaks it needs before I would install it at my main board. Anyone else try it?

Any progress on Akismet plugin for vb? That came up a couple months ago & it sounded like vbseo was looking into adding it to the product.

[briansol]

Found this excellent article by Brian on minimizing forum spam, specifically suited for vBulletin:
How to fight forum spamming - Security Watch

While all that is great for fighting spam, it also kills the user experience.

I know, i've left several sites running these things simply because it annoyed the hell out of me waiting a minute to post, when I can type 120 WPM, and posting a link to something useful that someone asked for that I knew about... ohh well, they didn't get it.

[Mike]

I agree with some of these points, disagree with others. As Brian mentioned in the post above me, some of this kills the user experience.

I do put a limit on editing posts, for the spamming reason. Members can edit posts for 30 minutes. posts cannot be edited after that. I think that is ample time to catch a typo.

[I, Brian]

Thanks for the recommendation, Juan - one of my vbseo licences running there.

And as the points above - indeed, a lot of the time you have to look at a balance between blocking spammers and the user experience. I expect sometimes the scales tip better in one way than another.

I think the overall point, though, is that there are ways in which you can block a lot of the spam outright - and ultimately common sense as to the needs of your forum has a lot to do with it.

I just hope it helps some people in the face of a problem that I think is getting worse.

[Princeton]

excellent article :up:

thanks for the link