vBulletin And SpamBots

[Bradley_Wint]

Hi folks, I was just wondering, how susceptible is vb to spambots? I remember phpbb2 suffered terribly from this, does vb share in the pain or does it keep them out? Cheers.

[Steve Machol]

Please see this: How to Reduce Spam and Registration Bots

[Freesteyelz]

In addition at vB.org there are several mods that target spam.

[Zachery]

None of which are nessary with the proper options set for the vBulletin capcha.

[Dean C]

The CAPTCHA is inaccesible. I'd rather use accessible techniques than image verification any day.

[ChrisLM2001]

Just keep in mind that no registration verification can stop a human from filling out the form, then releasing the bots afterwards. Like with any security, if the bad guys want in, they will get in. And that's the limitations of technology and being public with it -- so no matter who or what it is, spam will exist as long as humans want to spam it.

[class101]

I dunno if you can call the phpBB2 a CAPTCHA dude, at least the on in the BB3 stops bot, the one in BB2 stops nothing at all, the one in vB is far much advanced and hardly breakable + NoSpam plugin found on vbulletin.org, it just stops all.

[Kurisu]

None of which are nessary with the proper options set for the vBulletin capcha.

There are already bots which can verify the e-mail adress and bypass CAPTCHA.

[Steve Machol]

There are already bots which can verify the e-mail adress and bypass CAPTCHA.

I've never seen any proof of that.

[Dean C]

http://www.captchakiller.com/

[Wayne Luke]

http://www.captchakiller.com/

That system requires them to download the image and manipulate it to store the result. They are basically building a rainbow table for captcha. If you're site uses a custom font list and custom background images then it would be like salting your MD5 hashes to break rainbow tables. With vBulletin you could easily change the fonts and backgrounds used on a regular basis as well. Just build several sets and switch them out every month or so. The humans won't notice the difference but it would take ages for a machine to get a captcha that has been decoded and recognizes.

[Freesteyelz]

I've been quite happy with the Prevent Spam Post mod. So far it has captured every spam posting attempt without any false positives.

[Lenni]

I currently run a phpBB with an additional Spam Protection since I was getting flooded with Spam. Now there's a system in place that will ask simple questions. For example: 4 + 3 is? ... Yeah! 7. Since you can add your very own custom questions and answers, this successfully keeps spam bots from registering. I would like to see something like this built into vBulletin.

[Steve Machol]

This is already built into vB. Just create a new custom Profile Field and make it required. See this thread:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205214

[RedTyger]

I currently run a phpBB with an additional Spam Protection since I was getting flooded with Spam. Now there's a system in place that will ask simple questions. For example: 4 + 3 is? ... Yeah! 7.

There are already bots that can read mathematical questions for that kind of registration and personally I think its a very misguided idea. It may be readable across languages, but it is a question that comes easily to computers to say the least. All they'd have to do is learn to look for it the sum, they wouldn't have to work at solving it at all.

Not that I have an ingenious alternative, unfortunately.