Is vb5 "naked" for spammers?

[waldvb]

Thanks to Spam-O-Matic and a few VSA modifications - I have no problems with spammers (vb4). What about VB5 - is there a "firewall" against spammers? If not - there is no way I can buy it.

[ernestdefoe]

While the software may or may not have built in protection against spammers when vB5 goes gold or closer to gold the developers of the mods you use to rid your site of spammers I'm sure will update their mods to work with vB5 so if/when you upgrade to vB5 you will be protected again. Heck even the competition doesn't have built in spam protection especially if you are like me on a legacy license. I have to give up lifetime updates of the software if I want to take advantage of their spam protection. I'd rather use 3rd party spam protection mods than lose lifetime updates.

[dethfire]

Spam is my number 1 concern

[Sushubh]

Spam-O-Matic is amazing. It has saved me hours if not days worth of moderation. I did notice some form of Akismet integration in the beta. Though not sure how well it would work. I do how developers of Spam-O-Matic would release a version for vB5!

[Mark Hewitt]

Indeed, I have about 4 spammers trying to register every minute I couldn't deal with that without proper spam protection. This is by far the number 1 concern for me.

[Zachery]

Indeed, I have about 4 spammers trying to register every minute I couldn't deal with that without proper spam protection. This is by far the number 1 concern for me.

Trivial, non target specific questions do not help. 1+1, and what is 2 minus one, are not going to keep any bots out.

[Sushubh]

righto. stopforumspam is more like akismet for forums. it keeps a record of email addresses and ips i think and block them from registering.

vb5 has support for Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam. but i am not sure what exactly it is designed to prevent. they are of course aimed at blog comment spam prevention. so if the spammer is focused on forums, these are not going to help.

that's why i am surprised that vb5 is focusing on support for blog comment spam services rather than stopforumspam which is specifically designed for forums

[Zachery]

TypePad and Aksimet both help stop threads/posts/comments/etc from showing. If enough red flags go off for the content, it flags it for moderation to be reviewed. Sometimes it works too well and catches regular users, and it doesn't catch all spam.

Strong custom Q&A for your sites topic, and active moderation will take care of spam the majority of the time.

[ShyGuy82]

Trivial, non target specific questions do not help. 1+1, and what is 2 minus one, are not going to keep any bots out.

I actually use Random number + Random Number = ???

It works pretty good, I've only had 2 spammers registered and I think they were manually registered.

[Sushubh]

i can say one thing based on my experience with vb4... stopforumspam has saved me days if not weeks worth of moderation time. and i have always had akismet enabled on the forum.

before i discovered SFS, i was regularly targeted by spammers who would post porn images and links on forum. these were easy to discover. but finding them on user profiles and groups and other not so popular areas? pretty hard.

SFS has been pretty amazing to say the least. porn links? gone. warez spam? gone. the only downside is that i get a bunch of emails from potential new members who find it annoying that they were unable to register and the site claimed that they were spammers. i create accounts for these users manually.

but i have no idea how many new potential users i lost because they just left the site after seeing the message from SFS.

and yes, i believe most of the spammers on my site are humans because they post new threads in pretty relevant sections. also. i have custom fields that are compulsory to fill and they get around that too.

[Alfa1]

i wouldn't dream of running a site without stopforumspam and bad behavior. No need for ashkimet or Q&A.
sushub: just turn off 'Test User name' in SFS. THat will likely solve your problem. This setting is not needed anyway.

[mark99]

I actually use Random number + Random Number = ???

It works pretty good, I've only had 2 spammers registered and I think they were manually registered.

How do you do random number + random number in vB4 and or 5's Q&A anti-spam system? Not sure how to make the numbers random each time.

[sukagwe]

Maybe vb5 should integrate motion captcha http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=287803 as they human verification system

[Wayne Luke]

Captcha has seen its best days. Computers are more powerful and take advantage of even higher powered GPUs to break Captcha easily. Especially any relying on imagery. Those are actually the easiest to break these days. To retaliate, people make captchas more difficult and this simply causes users to abandon their registrations. Just like abandoning shopping carts in only purchasers. If you make things too difficult and frustrating, users go elsewhere.

If anything is integrated it needs to be a system that cannot be gamed easily and isn't visual to the end user. StopForumSpam has its plusses and minuses but is much better than implementing yet another Captcha system.

[Sushubh]

yeah. nothing is as bad as a captcha that is a pain in the ass to solve for a normal human being with not perfect vision.