Thread

We have quite a few tools to fight comment spam. Akismet, Bad Behavior, Defensio, comment spam plugin, etc. Is there anything - ANYTHING - out there for fighting EE Forum spam? I am at the end of my rope. I ban spammers and block their IP addresses, that but does absolutely nothing as far as getting rid of new spam.

Any plugins/modules/extensions I am missing that will check to see if something submitted to the forum is spammy?

Oh, I know I’m not the only one with this problem…or…am I? 😉

I’m running a few forums and the problem seems to come and go; it’s rather streaky. I have EE set up to notify me of any new registered users. EE is also set up to send me a copy of each post. Usually it’s easy to catch the blatant spammers and they get deleted rather quickly. I’ve also set up a few moderators with the ability to delete a post (but not the user; in some cases I’ll ban, then delete) which also helps police spam. Forum spam seems far less than comment spam, though, probably because forum members have to register first, verify the email address, then go through the effort of logging in, posting something, etc.

So, you’re not the only one who gets forum spam. It’s a curse.

I have one very hold static HTML site with a PHP form for contact. It’s not a comment form; just a plain old contact form. Every day it gets two or three spam hits with a load of link crapola that shows up in my inbox. Human spam or bot spam? Either way, it’s senseless.

Spammers should be given a six month sentence listening to Paris Hilton.

I occasionally get people signing up to be registered users on my site, and when I google the information they’ve submitted I find that they’ve registered at a bunch of other sites on the same day, and have no other document trail whatsoever associated with that username or email address.

Since I don’t do business on my site I have the luxury of rejecting a registration on that basis alone, but I’m curious if anyone else has observed a pattern with these kinds of registrants.

Yeah, these are way too manual for me unfortunately. I am hoping for some sort of Akismet/Bad Behavior/something else that ties in to the forum, and automatically gets rid of a lot of the spam. Our site is so large that it can take me up to 15-20 minutes day to JUST delete spam manually on the forums. In the comments, we actually get a lot MORE spam, but the spam tools in place take care of almost all of it, making dealing with comment spam on a daily basis take less than 2 minutes.

Yeah, these are way too manual for me unfortunately. I am hoping for some sort of Akismet/Bad Behavior/something else that ties in to the forum, and automatically gets rid of a lot of the spam. Our site is so large that it can take me up to 15-20 minutes day to JUST delete spam manually on the forums. In the comments, we actually get a lot MORE spam, but the spam tools in place take care of almost all of it, making dealing with comment spam on a daily basis take less than 2 minutes.

Wouldn’t it be easier to delete the spammer in EE forums? That automatically deletes the spammers posts.

I do. That is what I am talking about. I go into the forums, find a spam post, ban the spammer and delete all their posts and ban all their IP addresses, and move on to the next. I do that for like 15-20 minutes. Like I said, big site with lots of traffic. I need something that auto scrubs all that stuff out.

Something else that would help is something that I can enter specific words into, and if a thread is submitted with, say, 2-3 of those words, it isn’t accepted.

I don’t think there’s an “automatic” way of doing that because spam, by nature, is content, and content has to be viewed by someone to determine that it is spam.

That said, I tend to NOT go through the forums looking at every post, but take the incoming email notification instead. It’s much faster than scanning the forum posts. I delete quickly the good posts, flag the bad ones, then quickly delete the spammers. I’ve gone through the trouble of flagging and banning specific email addresses in User Banning, and specific IP addresses, but that’s turned out to be more work for less gain.

Dru, why are you spending your time doing it is my question?  You should have moderators that use your forums regularly and they can address it as they see it.  Or encourage your users to use the “Report” feature by making it more prominent, maybe even change the wording to “Report as Spam”.  Ronnie’s right, and if I’m not mistaken, Akismet and Bad Behavior can be provide a measure of prevention, but a forum is nearly always going require live moderators to keep things under control.  There’s no magic button; if there were, spammers wouldn’t exist because it would be so easy to stop them.

What we use here in our forums for all of the people trying to sell us tennis shoes and blue pills is a hidden forum that all of our staff (and sometimes community members) have the power to *move* topics to, a spam trap as it were.  It takes the spam offline so the spammer gets no benefit, your visitors aren’t annoyed with it, and your administrators only have to deal with spammers in one place.  The moderators don’t have to make decisions about deletions and bannings because they simply don’t have that authority - they can only move to the spam trap.

I should also add that if you know the geographic distribution of your legit visitors, you can stop a *ton* of spam by blocking swathing blocks of IP address from western Africa, India, and China.  That solution won’t work for many international sites, but those three areas of the world are the hotspots for most spam these days.  You can use ip2location to look up the region before banning, track some statistics of your site for awhile, and then make some reasonable conclusions.

DOes that include the ability to segregate and block countries by IP address by using the Country Name first, vs. collecting a bunch of IP addresses and hoping for the best?

For example, on some sites we get plenty of spam from eastern European countries, others get spam from China, and so on. Knowing specific IP address blocks for those specific countries would seem to help to reduce some spam.

You can use * wildcards so you can block ranges, e.g. xxx.xxx.*  The site I link to above can help you make the matches you need.

Dru, why are you spending your time doing it is my question?  You should have moderators that use your forums regularly and they can address it as they see it.  Or encourage your users to use the “Report” feature by making it more prominent, maybe even change the wording to “Report as Spam”.  Ronnie’s right, and if I’m not mistaken, Akismet and Bad Behavior can be provide a measure of prevention, but a forum is nearly always going require live moderators to keep things under control.  There’s no magic button; if there were, spammers wouldn’t exist because it would be so easy to stop them.

Would you believe that no one wants to be a mod BECAUSE of all the spam we get? Just today, I have spent 30 minutes cleaning up what was a spam-free board on Sunday night (the last time I did it.)

Now believe me, I know that no tool will be the silver bullet, I get that. I am just hoping for better tools. I have Akismet installed, and Bad Behavior - but those only interface with weblog comments. I would love for them to also work with forum post entries, and photo gallery comments. But they don’t. Again, I know they won’t solve everything, but I do know that Akismet and BB catch over 90% of the spam in the blog comments. If it did the same for the discussion forum, that would make me a happy fella.

There are other things that can be done to help alleviate this issue too:

1) You mentioned moving all spam threads into a hidden forum. Why not take this one more step and have some sort of option where you can tell EE to process everything in a specific forum area as spam. Delete ALL usernames, add ALL IP addresses to blacklist. That kind of thing.

2) How about EE doing an auto-suggest of IP address threads to be banned, using its database of blocked addresses? I have never done the wide ban of xxx.xxx.*, so I would be starting fresh if I did it manually. But I know that EE has a couple years worth of blocked single IPs. Why not leverage that and tell me, “Hey, a lot of your spam comes from xxx.xxx.*, wanna ban that?”

3) I am able to delete all posts from a single member, which is nice. How about also deleting all posts from an IP address? I just went through one area and deleted over 20 different spammers - all used the same IP address. Would have saved some time 😉

4) The Report function is great to alert mods - but how about adding some power to it? I wanna be able to set something where if at least x number of members report the same post, then it is auto-closed until it is reviewed.

Anyway, I am not AGAINST the manual measures of fighting spam on the forums, I’ve been doing it forever. I would just like some ways to use automated tools to help me out, similar to how I have them in weblog post comments.

I know I put a lot out there, but I think it’s needed. The question now, does this become a Feature Request thread, or should I duplicate that list manually to the FR area?

Just a point of clarification, Bad Behavior operates on all requests, and has no association with the comment module.  Bad Behavior doesn’t look at submitted content at all, but IP/Request fingerprinting for patterns that it knows to look like the source is a spammer.  I’m not familiar with the Akismet add-on, so I don’t know what data it’s filtering nor how complicated it would be to open it to the forum module if it’s not already.

Ah yes, the Akismet add-on one of Lowe’s.  It really wouldn’t be difficult to add the forum and the wiki to that add-on; might contact him and see if he’s interested in making the change.  As you mention, that service has a pretty high success rate, and that could make all of your other concerns moot.