Scary Comment Spam Botnet Demo

TomTester

Came across this thing on Reddit today: http://www.botmaster.net/movies/XFull.htm This is scary, and explains why one of my forums is overwhelmed with registered users that spam the hell out of me. On the plus side... in the movie you'll see that VANILLA is not listed as one of the compromised forums...

jprado

Nice find... I can't believe nobody posted a reply to this... We're actually starting to see the beginnings of spam comments get into our system. It was working great up until now. Currently we're getting a lot of world of warcraft spam... and I did a search for comment spam and found this -- which seems very plaussible... So does anybody have the same problems and what solutions have you explored and failed/succeded ? Thanks!

pbear

I came across this once, which is for blog comments, but in principle could be applied to forum registrations:
How to stop comment spam

I love the hidden fields idea.

TomTester

I find that invisible fields (hidden via CSS) with fake field names (e.g. call the email field newmail and the invisible fake field email) will prevent a very large number of automated spamming tools from abusing your system. If the fake field has content (or in the aforementioned case, if the fake field contains an email address) then confirm success but ignore the post/registration/etc. In some cases I send automated emails to the spambot with fake logins or warnings that they've been banned. Do note that 'human spam' (cheap labor filling our registration forms) can hardly be prevented.

Simonb

my vb forum has a spam filter which stops it all

So what does vanilla has a stop?