AI Bots or Copy-Paste Spammers?

[SaN-DeeP]

You cant help this spammers, unless you have a very good captcha mechanism in place.
Or try to change your forum registration process a bit.

We used to get 200+ spam posts in a day (and it was impossible to ban entire China, would have taken huge server loads). Over 500+ spam users making use of @gmail.com mostly..
((Google wont restrict spammers here surprisingly))

But spam tools helped a bit, again disadvantage of having those spam tools as many times even a genuine user is marked as a spammer on some site/forum and be default you ban this user too.

All these spammers run via a script code targeted towards your forums (including many others).
Reason = Link Building services, etc.

Best is to restrict your user profile pages, signatures, domain name in profile posts to members only.

 

[Chris]

You can restrict countries etc if you use a provider like Cloudflare without adding server load. Check IPs for VPN's etc, you can be effective at stopping automated attacks are things are logged, and you can find out the common thread.

 

[SaN-DeeP]

you can be effective at stopping automated attacks are things are logged, and you can find out the common thread.

What does this means ? Kindly explain more.

Thanks wasn't aware about blocking a country using Cloudflare, will come handy.
But still most of the spammers are from China and blocking entire country wont be a good idea at all.
If you temporarily block them, they will again start jumping..
Most are done only for link building services.

 

[Chris]

You block countries from the register/login page, and if there are legit users they send you an email request or....you have their country flagged for moderation which is the better user experience imo.

 

[SaN-DeeP]

I like the registration option of namepros (one of oldest domain related forum)

 

[feldon30]

Fortunately most of the spammers continue to be straight up spam that's easily identified. The number of spammers using plausible copy-pasted content from topic-adjacent forums has remained low.

 

[ThornInYourSide]

If you don't have overly high volume and enough staff to monitor, consider post moderation for the first five (or so) posts. Nothing appears until approved. They rarely make more posts than that to begin with.

 

[Deathstarr]

I ban Russia via cloud flare, I have a huge robots.txt that stops a lot of junk search engines. I also have mod que set kinda strict.

Also, I have a registered group where people have to get 10 post to use the marketplace. It has slowed spam by a lot.