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. To control that disable the links and signature and PMs. If you want give access to your members create a new user group called members and promote users from Registered Users to Members if they make atleast 5 posts. Members will have access to all services like posting links, signatures and live links.
AdminCP > UserGroup Manager > Registered Members >
Signatures -> No
Allow link BBcode -> No
Allow HTML BBcode -> No
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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