Until recently i have encountered a sudden new attacks of spam registrations and many many spam threads posted in my forum. I just cant figure out how as I have already enabled captcha in registration page and enabled email confirmation. Despite this somehow spammers managed to bypass the registration and managed to post spam threads.

Fighting spam involves great amount of work. Just make sure you do the following settings in your vbulletin forum.

1. Enable captcha and Email Confirmation forum registration page.
The first step to fight spam is to prevent bots from registering in your forum. Follow the 3 steps.

Vbulletin AdminCP > Vbulletin Options > User Registration Options > Enable Image Verification
Vbulletin AdminCP > Vbulletin Options > User Registration Options > Enable Image Verification
Vbulletin AdminCP > Vbulletin Options > Image Settings > Select GD Library and Random Shapes

If you want to manually approve and moderate new users before they are allowed to post, you can do that as well.

Vbulletin AdminCP > Vbulletin Options > User Registration Options > Moderate New Members

2. Disable URL Links and Signatures

Dont allow newly registered users to post URL links and signatures. Force them to make atleast 15 posts only then they will be allowed to post live URL links to external websites.

To Disable Live URL links:

Download this plugin: Forbid Users from Posting Links or Images

This wont allow newly registered users to post live links.

To Disable Signatures

Force your registered users to make 15 posts to be allowed a signature. For that you need to do create a new group called Member Group. Only those who had done 15 posts will be automatically moved from registered user group to member group. Member group will have signature permissions. To accomplish this you have to do promotions in vbulletin groups.

1. Go to Vbulletin CP > Usergroup > Registered users > Allow signatures no
2. Create a new group called members Members.
3. Go to Usergroups > Promotions > select posts as promotion strategy > 15 posts.

4. Enable signature to members group and limit signature to one line.

3. Disable Private Messaging.

Private messaging can be exploited by lot many spammers. Disable it

Admin CP > UserGroups > Registered Users > Set Maximum stored messages to 0

This will disable private messaging.

4. Install One click sweep and clean vBulletin Plugin.

If some spammer posts number of theads you have to manually go delete all his posts and then ban the spammer. It would prove lots of hardwork if you have many members spam. With one click clean plugin you point to user and delete all posts and ban him with just one click

Download: One-touch Spam Ban and Cleanup

Do also consider Akismet Vbulletin Plugin.

5. Contact Form Image Verification.

You dont want spammers to target your contact us form to send spam. To prevent this enable the image verification in vbulletin, so that unregistered users may contact you by verifying a image captcha.

Admin CP > Vbulletin Options > Site Name/ URL / Contact Details >
Allow unverified users to use contact page -> yes, but verify image

Despite this, there are many more methods like adding new field in registration form asking for logical or arithmetic questions.

Hope this helps!

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