How do you avoid spam bots????

[dreamer81]

I keep getting a lot of bots on my site that spams my site with sexual content...

how do I avoid bots??? or protect myself better?

[Dilly]

Wear a condom. ;)

No, seriously - whats the link to your site so we can check out your registration settings.

You can also moderate the first x posts for each member.

[cheat-master30]

My advice, as usual is to question and answer verification and moderate the first few posts of every member. Oh, and remember, make your questions somewhat related to your site's theme, that way it's a lot better at keeping out the bots (since things like basic maths question can be cracked by ANYONE, while at least specialised questions will require some research if they have no interest in the subject area).

[dreamer81]

moderating the first x posts seems like a good idea.... :) I allready have a user group called Active users, that users are moved to when they have made 5 posts.

So all Registered users could be moderated... :)

thanks

I made a question though, just to see if it keeps the bots away. The answer is easy though, but lets see

[Floris]

How to Reduce Spam and Registration Bots (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=275800)

[y2ksw]

We have coded a vbulletin product (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=193895) which adds Spamhaus protection & more to forums. It is a recent (beta) release at vbulletin.org, but pretty well tested on two sites which seem to be a preferred destination of all kind of spammers.

Besides Spamhaus (or alternative world-wide databases), it checks also for existing emails and stores all invalid email addresses into a world-wide database for some time. This makes it impossible to recycle a single email address on several forums, and voids the attempt to register that email later, after having failed the test.

The server load at the forums is minimal, in fact the main code executes on our servers. The script will return only a plain text reply code: 1 = valid, 0 or blank = invalid email address, and service messages (negative numbers). The "client" side script is implemented for vBulletin (product), but may be easily adapted to any kind of script able to receive HTTP content.

Our intention is to furnish a long term solution similar to Spamhaus (http://www.spamhaus.org) for forums, if possible for free. The only big difference would be, that besides IP's also email boxes are stored, making it a pretty hard job to abuse even for occasional spammers or unknown "newcomers". To make this system work, it requires a lot of testers (forums). Only the sharing of spammer IP's and invalid email addresses makes it powerful and increasingly difficult to break in - at any place in the world.

If you have declared war to spammers as we have, please take place and relax, because with your participation you will help - together with the captcha specialists at the other end - to "terminate" the forum spammers. ;)

[Kestryll]

You can also moderate the first x posts for each member.

How is this done?

[Floris]

Default usergroup : always moderate
New usergroup : never moderate
Promotion : for default to upgrade based on post count to new usergroup.