Problem with spam accounts

[johnboyman]

Hello. My forum has a user that keeps making new accounts and spamming my site. I banned their user accounts and blocked their ips. It still isn't enough. Is there a way that i can self verify a accounts before they are created. Like this person makes names like this ndffmdfkonsbnsd I would like to review the name of a person requesting an account first to weed out thoughs kind of silly spammy accounts. Is there a way? Thanks

[OrganForum]

Set AdminCP->User Registration Options->Moderate New Members to Yes. Subjects user's posts to a moderators review before appearing on your forum.
Set AdminCP->User Registration Options->Allow Multiple Registrations Per User to No. Makes it more difficult for a single user to establish multiple accounts.
Set AdminCP->User Registration Options->Verify Email Addresses in Registration to Yes. Spammers often use bogus email addresses. This option will prevent them from posting.
Set AdminCP->User Registration Options->Require Unique Email Address to Yes. Makes it more difficult to establish multiple accounts.

Periodically review the list of Users Awaiting Moderation and Users Awaiting Email confirmation and delete suspicious accounts.

[Wayne Luke]

You should also probably implement Recaptcha under Settings -> Human Verification Manager. You will need to get a key from Google to use this.

Looking under Settings -> Spam Management can help as well. The two services here need authentication keys as well but I believe they are free for a certain amount of usage.

[johnboyman]

Nice all done. Thanks a lot. I have one more question that relates to my previous. The IP addresses that were spamming me have a suffix on them that is rev.ponytelecom.eu. There is regularly a large list of these domain often all of them on my who is online page. It may not be a vbulletin issue, but Could this be a form of attack in progress if so are there any vBulletin plugins that can identify attacks or attack patterns. For example I know some bots will load a site over and over again to crack them?

[Wayne Luke]

vBulletin is a poor place to track IP addresses or how many times it is hitting your server. Even if the application can block them, it will use resources to access the database and display an error page. Tracking and Blocking IP Addresses should be done at the server level. You would probably want to talk to your hosting provider about this. They may be able to implement mod_evasive on the server. It may already be enabled.