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how to avoid spam?
mikerds
New
I started to receive a few post with some spam daily, which is very annoying and takes my time. see attached. 
I have to manually ban those users and delete their content every day. Is there any way to stop them completely?
0
Comments
That happens when you disable captcha , you get bots there are other plugins to help out.
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yeah.. I enabled captcha again... let me see if it will help. What are other plugins?
go to the add on section and enter Registration in the search bar... any plugin that has to do with registration will be found.
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We use:
https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/addregistrationquestion-plugin
which allows you to ask a custom question at sign up, along with
https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/registrationrestrictlogger-plugin
which allows you to add in custom text which will cause a registration to be rejected if present.
Between them, they do a very good job of keeping bots out.
And don't forget you can enable "Stop Forum Spam" that works for me without the need of other plugin (along with Google's NoCaptcha reCaptcha enabled)
Than you for your answers! I hope I'll get rid of those spammers now :-)
there is two types of spam, manual and automatic.
It is hard to fool a human. They pay people in developing countries, and the labour is cheap. Often those paying for the spam, may not even know they are paying someone to spam.
grep is your friend.
The way to discourage manual spammers is to make things unattractive to them.
Such as no indexing/hiding new user discussions, and hiding their comment when not logged in. Not allowing links in titles. Not allowing links for new users. Pre-approving new user's posts.
grep is your friend.
Automatic spamming it all about maths and permutation. Security by obscurity is usually not enough. Security by honey trap is not enough either. Security by inside knowledge meh that can be got round.
This becuase there is is an intelligent human behind that program and they can adapt it.
grep is your friend.