Recent wave of notification spam and what I did

ddumont

Note: I realize this isn't a once-size-fits-all solution, but I wanted to throw this out there for anyone else who is having the same problem.

Recently (as of late August, according to the activity log on my forum) there has been a rash of bots signing up on my forum and setting an activity message in what I can only think is an attempt to increase page ranks for certain urls. I do have re-captcha turned on, but there seem to still be quite a few bots that make it through, using all sorts of different email addresses.

I didn't notice it until a few days ago, though, because I've never really found much use for the activity section of the forum... and often end up missing messages sent to me from other users. I suspect they were counting on this... so, I decided to foil their filthy plans.

I've set 2 routes in my dashboard:

activity -> /discussions    permanent
profile -> /activity /profile     permanent

I then set this CSS in my theme:

.Menu .Activity, .Tabs li.Activity, .Profile form.Activity { 
  display:none !important; 
}

To hide the activity link at the top, you need this change:
https://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden/pull/1453

That's it

peregrine

@ddumont

although a totally different solution...
the botstop plugin is really nice, if you haven't noticed it.

Anonymoose

@peregrine said:
the botstop plugin is really nice, if you haven't noticed it.

Sometimes it is hard to find the plugins you want, because the names and descriptions don't have the right keywords.

For example, when I search for "spam" I can not find the Botstop plugin.

peregrine

@Anonymoose said:

Sometimes it is hard to find the plugins you want, because the names and descriptions don't have the right keywords.

For example, when I search for "spam" I can not find the Botstop plugin.

It's been mentioned many times that plugins need to be organized in categories
however, searching on the forum often helps find the plugin, especially in this case.

http://vanillaforums.org/search?Search=spam