Spam membership requests

I am having many requests for membership which are obviously spam. Brandon answered my last thread on this subject in January and basically said that a few might slip through forumotions robust filtering system. I've had aprox 20 request in the last 12 hour, on average I usually have about 1 or 2 applications a month. My forum is set to admin activation. As I am receiving so many its time consuming to look through ever application to filter out the genuine ones. Is there any more that can be done to stop this happening. Is anyone else experiencing the same? Many thanks

Hello,
Spambots love to target inactive, quiet forums with little to know one on them, this makes it easier make it onto the forum undetected and un stopped so that it can post its spammy messages with little resistance. That said, increasing activity on your forum, having staff, etc can do alot to make your forum not a preferred target of spambots and spammers. That said, even the most active forums can still get them ( including here on the support forum), it will happen. All you can do is be on the look out, look for email addresses with lots of periods in them, sometimes one will get passed you, but they usually are recoginizable as a spambot within the first post, so with active staff you usually ban then immediatelly before they do any real damage.

I would say, just be on the look out for common signs of spambot regerstations, but in general I wouldnt even stress them. I usually just activate every new user registation I get on my forum, unless I feel it is 100% clearly a spambot or spammer. Otherwise, I just regard every new user registaion and a potential new member. If a user posts and it turns out to be a spambot or spammer (once more usually determined by a single posts), then I simply ban on the spot and delete whatever posts it managed to post in the meantime .

-Brandon

https://help.forumotion.com/t88133-security-optimization-captcha-at-new-user-registration

Samantha.

Thanks Brandon, I'm not sure that whoever whatever is doing this are bots as they nearly all use email addresses like gmail,yahoo hotmail. I am unable to ban some of the email addresses used, as I would end up banning many members who use the same email addresses I tried as I always do with new applications, to send emails to those and they are returned. I have now activated captcha many thanks Samantha. Even now as I am typing this someone else has applied, using gmail So it has to be a human? Another one just now using hotmail. My forum is also quite active

Ah, thats precisely why I dont really worry about what is a spambot and whats not, I just activate them all and if they turn out to be a spambot/spammer, then I just ban them, delete their posts and move on.

Thats the best way to handle them, if you spend alot of time worrying which users are spambots and which ones arent, then you might make a mistake and up banning a potential new user or current users in the process. Thats why, I personally feel the best way to handle spambots/spammers, is as the come, when they come and when they post and its spam, bam, banned and posts deleted. Quite simple really .

-Brandon

Two other methods of checking commonly used on forums generally rely on IPs being shown when "who ever it is" applies for membership, the IP is then checked on an IP location site & mxtoolbox blacklist, however the IPs don't show until they have posted or confirmed account, is there a way to get the IP from the email address ?

Is this solved?

give this Topic a try
https://help.forumotion.com/t137330p30-ip-address-in-profile#927986
it will add the Ip address in the Profiles when they make a new account but right now we have a problem with it adding the Ip address of the members already have an account.

Right now the member that made the code is on sick leave so he will not reply to any problems but i will be more then happy to help if i can