Spam Bots

[Calvin]

Hey guys, I'm not that good at vBulletin as you can tell by how many questions I'm asking but do you know the best way to prevent spam bots? I've made it so you have to verify your email and also enabled captcha. They all seem to sign up and go to the Food and Drink section mainly and advertise crap like torrents..

Thanks, +rep.

[lTraditional]

LOL, happens on my mates forums. Just ban them all and make the human verification harder and try and make sure that you have to have your post moderated before being published for the first couple of posts so that you can decline the approval of publishing it and then it won't happen again. That's all I can currently think of but you can always try and look for software to install onto the forum which stops spam bots!

[Jonster]

A lot of them are people in cheap labour countries that sign up to forums and post themselves. Thats why 'human' verification isn't as effective anymore and so moderating posts is probably the best way currently.

The other way, and you'll notice a lot of larger forums are starting to do is to require email verification and then before the user can post be authorised by an admin (account activation). A lot of the email addresses used by these spammers are quite easily identifiable - whilst it doesn't guarantee 100% results, it will lower the level of spam significantly.