Handling spam hidden with BBcode

[jola]

I have noticed a new spam problem on my vBulletin forum. People register and post messages that have nonsence content with hidden links in the messages. The links are hidden with bbCode.

The posts contains no real content and has a hidden link. The link can only be seen if you edit the message and then switch edtor mode so that the bbCode tags can be seen. The hidden spam tags are made in the following way:

[NOPARSE][URL="http://spam-site-url.com"][COLOR=#f7f7f7][U]spam-site[/U][/COLOR][/URL][/NOPARSE]

I have not found a good way to find this kind of bbCode hidden spam posts.

Has anyone got any suggestions about how to find this kind of hidden spam and how I could change my forum setup to handle this problem better?

[Wayne Luke]

The only real way to handle it at the moment is to do it manually. If the same links are getting spammed over and over, add the domain to vBulletin's censor list. Or you could censor #f7f7f7 so users can't use that color in their posts.

[jola]

Thanks for your quick reply. We've done as you suggested and cencored the background color. This made these spam posts show up. Great! This at least makes it much easier to find already posted hidden spam link like this. However, if spammers notice this they could just instead use a color which is very close to the background color and thereby hide the spam links quite well and avoid the censorship.

It would be good with a new function in future vBulletin versions to somehow prevent people from using bbCode tags that hide content (colors similar to the background, very small text etc.)

Thanks for your support!

[MRGTB]

Problem is, members can still create "transparent" gif/png images, maybe 1px large only. Then use that as an image link. You would not see the image in the post because it's transparent, no matter what background colour theme you use. And because it's only 1px large, means you would be lucky to hover your mouse over it by accident and spot it as an image link. They can store the image on their own sites server, then just use BBCode on another site like yours to link to it as an image (link back) to their site.

How do you get around that problem with spammers.

[jola]

One thing that would help a bit to find this kind of hidden spam is if it could be possible to search for keywords in the bbCode tags of all posts.