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Old September 5, 2007, 12:54 AM   #1
MD_Willington
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Join Date: August 17, 2005
Location: SE WA State.
Posts: 563
vBulletin® and spammers

Is the board running the latest vBulletin® updates?

The phone spammers appear to be out in force lately...
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Old September 5, 2007, 09:24 AM   #2
Mal H
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Location: Somewhere in the woods of Northern Virginia
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Just out of curiosity, how would any update to vbulletin prevent someone who registers with a legitimate name and email address from posting spam?
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Old September 5, 2007, 10:59 AM   #3
MD_Willington
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I hate to admit it, but we were finding that actual people and not bots were the ones signing up on our forums, somewhat like "gold farmers" but instead they just sign up for posting adds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_(gaming)

You can also spoof a legitimate email address, and a lot of the CAPTCHA can be bypassed by bots now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

vBulletin is now up to version 3.6.8

Also, bots tend to use the birthdate of March 28, 1983.


Couple of things that help:

Ask new registrants a question, something simple like "how much is two plus two". This can mess up some bots.

A lookup of common spam terms like NOKIA and automatically moderate any new postings that contain those terms.

There are examples of this that can be downloaded from vBulletin.org.
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