[Netherrealmer]

Every time I left my forums for like 5 hours, When I come back it is flooded by spams of Marijuana Gummies. I have nothing against Marijuana but I have members as young as 10. At first I just repurpose their spams but now I just delete them because they flood me with 40 spams in one drop. They are so aggressive when it comes to their flooding.

They keep coming back after I ban them because they use Outlook emails. Outlook is like the go to email service of spammers because unlike gmail, it doesn't need mobile verification. I am tinkering a way to block people who uses Outlook emails.

I got 200 today.

[Fergal]

I got 200 today.

Wow that's a lot and it obviously takes a significant amount of time to deal with them. Do you have many legitimate users using Outlook mail?

Do you know if those spammers are coming from particular IP address ranges that you could block, without affecting legitimate members and visitors?

[Yugocean]

I have Gmail without mobile verification, and also have outlook.
Email is not a problem, just use a filter feature that does not allows some words, and such posts will not appear.

[Netherrealmer]

@Yugoocean how old is your gmail? They are stricter now that mobile verification is needed for new users.

The gummy Mass Holes are back. They keep coming back like cockroaches that don't die.

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They really think my community is the right place to market marijuana candies. They are like those Love Guru spammers who use to flood Bubblews. The spammers are scammers too, I read reviews their stores don't deliver the ordered candies.

[mrki444]

Check news about forum script you use. Maybe there is a patch to block bot. This topics looks done by bot.

[augusta]

Are you sure there are humans, getting about 200 of them in day looks suspicious like what can't be done by humans alone. The best bet will be to look for a way to block of them off

[Netherrealmer]

I think they are bots, They didnt respond to my death threats.

[CyberFreak]

The key is multiple layers of protection and making the signup unique. No method is 100% effective as human spammers can behave just like normal humans but bots are for the most part pretty easy to block on a self hosted forum.

Depending on the forum software, you can do the following things which all have varying success in blocking bots

• Use a Q&A CAPTCHA and write questions that are unique to your site (not what colour is the sea or 2+2) but something related to the topic of your forum that legit users know but spammers won’t really. It can also be questions related to how your sites looks (what colour is the text in our sites logo for example)
• Add custom profile fields to the signup that need to be filled and restrict the inputs in length and characters to fit what you are asking. If it is a car site and you ask how many cars the user has, restrict the input to just numbers and a max of 2 or 3 characters. Bots will probably try to leave it blank or input something different in there like a web address
• Block disposable email address - some softwares have a extension for it but there is services online with apis which can be used to check if the registration comes from a proper provider or not
• Use a service like StopForumSpam which has a database of bad IPs and emails. Just don’t check usernames against the service. If that email is used to spam another site and they are reported, they can’t spam you and that email address is now tainted
• Work on blocking VPNs/open proxies/data centres from connecting to your site
• Increase moderation means that any that does come through can be dealt with quickly

[Netherrealmer]

Thanks Cyberfreak, I will try to see if this will work on combatting them.

I had blocked emails that uses outlook but some still finds a way to work around. I just recently hired a moderator because I realize I do not want to do this hard labor of deleting or repurposing the spams.
I got 30 today, so that decrease is a development.

[JASPREET]

That's too many and I remember another popular faced issues like that in the past and that was so annoying for us as members but the admin was able to stop the nonsense by adding more security so they were unable to join the website and thereby eliminated the spam

[Yugocean]

This is hard, to keep them out, you need to filter in the titles and posts, CBD, grummies, and anything with .com, .us, .in etc .

[Vehlijanta]

Stop allowing new users for some time and add captcha and other ways to track/ Wipe such spam activities

[Yugocean]

Stop allowing new users for some time and add captcha and other ways to track/ Wipe such spam activities

This will make forum unattractive, non paying forums cannot put conditions.

[mrki444]

I saw one time a plugin on forum which rewrite all hyperlinks into link you want or some other word. Maybe this could help but it could affect on regular users which would like post non spam link.

[Streamguy69]

When I had a paying blog, I would get hundreds of spam ads about pills and other things. all I would do is delete them and more would be there the next day

[Netherrealmer]

They left me alone today. I also blocked a certain country for now. I don't have members from that country so I might as well ban the whole country than deal with 200 spams a day.

[Yugocean]

They left me alone today. I also blocked a certain country for now. I don't have members from that country so I might as well ban the whole country than deal with 200 spams a day.

If you have traffic from those countries and your CPM /CPC ads or whatever still earn you from there, then don't ban.

[Netherrealmer]

I think these spammers are not bots, they came from Microworkers, they are paid cents by spamming and they decided my forum with a population of 12 year old is the place to sell marijuana candies.

[mrki444]

I think these spammers are not bots, they came from Microworkers

How do you know it is Microworkers? Maybe it is Picoworkers or some other micro job platform.

[Netherrealmer]

Wherever they came from, they are paid cents for it.