stone me...

[disruptive]

I've just looked at my forum which was left unattended and gone back to the tens of thousands of posts...to find

10,000's of posting from dodgy russians selling sex...

check it out

forum.approval.co.uk

What should I do with it?

 

[mojoco]

Delete all posts by each user that has spammed the site, then introduce safeguards to make it harder for spammers to become members.

 

[kendalcottages]

Wow... what a mess... and it looks like it's from multiple posts, too, so that's a pain. Can you delete all posts after a certain date?

 

[tifosi]

There's a mod for VBulletin that lets you ban a user & delete all their posts at the same time.

There's probably one for phpBB. First I'd look for something like that & also ensure either new users need email & captcha verification, or turn off new users until it's sorted.

S

 

[Lucky Luke]

Unhelpful post about the misery of forum spam....

Good luck with the clean up

 

[rob]

Prune all posts from data A to date B

job done.

then keep an eye on it better

 

[expertc]

I've just looked at my forum which was left unattended and gone back to the tens of thousands of posts...to find

10,000's of posting from dodgy russians selling sex...

check it out

forum.approval.co.uk

What should I do with it?

Join the club! Now, something that worked wonders for me.

1. Registration is done by humans and post by bots (I'll talk about it later)
2. Check your logs. In fact you might see only 3-5 IPs "guilty" in getting straight to the post page (entry and exit pages are the same). That IPs are mostly from Russia / Ukraine / Moldova - block them. This cuts spam by 50%.
3. Google-up “Advanced Textual Confirmation” and install (requires adding one line in PHPBB code).
4. Put a very simple question, something like “Capital of Japan”. Require answer once per session. Change questions once a week. Bots are going nowhere.

Done!

 

[Flipper]

Most of it courtesy of xrummer probably, I set it so that people need a post count of 10 or more before they can posts links on my forum (vbulletin), I also had to make it so that you need a minimum post count to send pm’s (pm spam is quite popular too) and had to ban certain usernames people were registering as like board admin type names in order to do it, they think of everything these days.