British BBQ Society Forums

Hi everyone, due to the amount of spam accounts that are being setup at the moment i have temporarily removed signatures. We cannot afford for the forum to be associated with dodgy site by the bots. once we have worked out how to stop this everything will be reinstated.

Hi Toby,

It might help to use Q+A captcha on signup and dispense with the visual one (this has been cracked by spambots anyway, so is effectively useless).

For Q+A captcha you need to set a question that's relevant to the forum, but not easily Google searched.

eg.

Q. What fuel does a BBQ use? - Bad, easily searchable.

Q. What animal is depicted in the BBBQS Logo? - Good, a Google search shouldn't yield a result for this (or not a correct one at any rate.)

Every time Xrumer (the software that spammers use) is updated, they add more features to bypass registration. They even update its database with non-standard Q+A solutions, solved manually by humans. The only sure-fire way to stop them is to stay ahead of the game.

We have a q and a one at the moment still no joy stopping it. Have someone working in it at the moment

Toby wrote:We have a q and a one at the moment still no joy stopping it. Have someone working in it at the moment

If your Q+A question is letting spammers register, it's been cracked. I had exactly the same with my forum, I had about half a dozen (relevant) questions set and we started to get multiple spam signups. One or more of the Q's had been cracked. I binned them all and set one new one and the signups stopped immediately.

We're still on admin approval for all signups, but since I changed the Q we haven't had a single one.

Good thread on the phpbb support forums here https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... 1fe73c223e (you might want to skip to the last few pages for the latest techniques though, it changes all the time).

thanks, just tried a couple of different questions. No one had told me how to change them!

Hope it works! Really, I feel your pain and understand what a pain in the (smoked) butt these spammers can be.

Spammers use humans too!

looks like it may have worked, will give it a couple more days to clear out the rubbish and then re-instate everything

aris wrote:Spammers use humans too!

They do, but if you're getting constant and unrelenting spam signups it's more than likely bot activity. Pretty much everyone agrees that you'll never stop determined human spammers.

Toby wrote:looks like it may have worked, will give it a couple more days to clear out the rubbish and then re-instate everything

Great news. At some point the question may be cracked again. Probably worth having another in mind for this eventuality. Also, having only one question means that you know straight away - if you had 10, for example, there might only be one that's cracked and letting the spammers through, but you wouldn't know which one.

Do you also use the newly registered users group as an extra layer of protection? I'm assuming you do as my first few posts were on admin approval.