Forum attacks

[Silent]

Well I run a forum of my own and its a decent one at that but......

What I'm here to ask is how if you have one...how do you protect your site from spam like spam accounts and porn posts....This has been a 2 week battle with me and my admins and we don't know what to do. We have it on lock down nothing can post or anything.

What should we do?

[itsJustme89]

Do you have any kind of registration/login on your forums? If you do you should also have some kind of verification or activation to make sure bots can't register. What I mean is making users click a validation link or having one of those photo things with numbers or letters that only humans can read

[Silent]

We do have Registration/login with captcha and admins now have to verify it.

But knock on wood nothing has happen for about a hour from now....Hopefully it will stay that way.


I wonder if its our bots that advertise our site that attracts the assholes.

[itsJustme89]

I wonder if its our bots that advertise our site that attracts the assholes.
It could be, depending on where you advertise your site. you mind if I check it out, you can PM me a link

Reading more about Captcha, it seems there are several ways it can be beaten. Mostly though it would require an insecure implementation on your part

[Antares]

Umm, I will kinda go in order of what I think of.

Have captcha or something similar on the reg page. Then see if you have a mod/hack that prevents IPs from doing registrations. Make sure you have allow one email per account.

Make sure they have to go to their email to confirm registration before they can post.
Umm...and then have your mods look out for similar usernames/attitudes/etc.
Then, it is just a matter of banhammering :P

[Commander Thor]

Umm, I will kinda go in order of what I think of.

Have captcha or something similar on the reg page. Then see if you have a mod/hack that prevents IPs from doing registrations. Make sure you have allow one email per account.


You mean one account per E-Mail. :p

[Silent]

We ban all ips and emails and that dont work so as of now the site is down.
Make sure they have to go to their email to confirm registration before they can post.
they do have to do that+ admins have to approve now
one account per E-Mail
this is will have to look into so far I can find a option on how to add that.

It could be, depending on where you advertise your site. you mind if I check it out I will pm you with link :)

[Bryan B]

We ban all ips and emails and that dont work so as of now the site is down.
Make sure they have to go to their email to confirm registration before they can post.
they do have to do that+ admins have to approve now
one account per E-Mail
this is will have to look into so far I can find a option on how to add that.

It could be, depending on where you advertise your site. you mind if I check it out I will pm you with link :)

If you already do all that and band all that IPs and mails u cant do anything more

[Silent]

If you already do all that and band all that IPs and mails u cant do anything more

Well if that is the case looks like I will have to hire more mods.

[Oblivion]

Use IP ban if your forum allows.
Hire more people to help.
Make sure it's email verified sign up.
Disable images and linking on the forums for members with less than x amount of posts.

[Silent]

Ok all your ideas have helped lots we are now at really nice security and have more mods on duty so we should be fine :D thanks all!