Spammers, what do you do about them?

With increasing indexed pages and becoming more known my site seems to attract more and more commercial spammers lately. Ringtones, gadgets, pills, you name it, every subject comes along and they don't even try to hide it with the chosen usernames like free_ringtones and such. Of course I have image and email verification turned on and the latter usually makes sure the accounts don't get confirmed but still I find it annoying. Any measures you've taken you would like to share?

Try to keep ahead of them with the various mods available on vBulletin.org .. the vBSpamSan works ok.. more false positive (reports of valid posts being Spam) than letting actual spam through.

I recently banned .ru (the entire country) and cashette.com because of the amount of spam coming from these avenues.

Haha, I've banned exactly the same last week. Guess they visit vBSEO to harvest sites.

I'll look into some mods whenever vBulletin.org gets back online again. They're having problems for over 15 hours now...

You're probally best of stopping spam in its tracks by requiring either manual user email validation, or administrative validation. Including some sort of captcha form on registration. Oh, and the Spaminator plugin works wonders too

One thing that I noticed helps alot is the report a post button avialable(it may be a hack) also, there is a hack where you can keep users from posting links in the first couple of posts. This sometimes is a good way depending on your site content.

Originally Posted by Ace Shattock

I recently banned .ru (the entire country) and cashette.com because of the amount of spam coming from these avenues.

Ace, I did the exact same thing about 3 weeks ago. In fact, I'm ranking pretty well for cashette spam on Google

Cashette spammer even posted an advertisement for their forum spamming services on my board. That was really interesting to see/read.

Besides banning those tlds, we don't allow members to start threads until they've got a few replies made. Not 100% that I'll keep that as I think we've lost a few new members but it certainly cut down the spam. I've added the hack where a reported post creates a thread in the Mods forum. That helps to make sure we see spam quickly.

Good luck, Ross