So, I have, for the last few months, been dealing with an increasing amount of spam on one of my more popular forums. After yet another posting for knock-off Ugg boots, I finally had enough and started investigating options for controlling this mess.I found, during my investigation, a site that aggregates spammer information from a community of people like me, this wek site is Stop Forum Spam. This web site accepts submissions from forum and blog owners about people that have spammed their site, and keep track of the info.
Spammers often use automated systems, or, predictable behavior, when putting out their spam. Stop Forum Spam tracks usernames, email addresses and IP addresses, and tracks how many time each is reported by unique site owners. Then, when people are registering at your web site, you can check their database with a very simple to use API and get an XML formatted result for each bit of data you submit,
Example, I have somebody registering at my site, during registration, I submit the username, email address and IP address to their system, the API returns, for each piece of info, the last time it was seen and the frequency of it being reported, and you can choose how to handle the registration based on that returned data.
My own scheme, I submit all three of the bits, and if at least two of them are found in the database, I immediately flag the profile as "banned". With that flagging, they never have a "last logged in" date set, since they'll never be able to log in, so, by querying my user database for banned members that have never logged in I can see how many people my system has trapped, determine any false positives, and further tweak the system.
The very first night I caught over a dozen very obviously spammer registrations, since then I have a list of about 30 I have caught, while dozens and dozens have continued to successfully register. Only one spammer has gotten through, and I promptly submitted that user to the database to stop him from getting into other sites.
I have found since there are plugins and addons for many forum and blog open source tools that work with Stop Forum Spam's service as well, so if you run such a system, it might be worth looking for before going and custom coding anything.
Hope this helps a few people, and happy spam stopping!
2 comments:
I posted my comment policy after reading a post at Lorelle on WordPress suggesting every blog should have a comment policy. I think it’s a good idea—commenters can see you’re not singling them out but following a well-thought-out, established policy. Of course, the spammers don’t read or care about policies.
Nice post! Really its a great way to prevent spam comments on our forum comment and blog comment. I am going to use this attribute in my blog. Thanks for sharing this article.
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