i might add that GA is where most of the spam is occuring recently. i think we have 7 mods, super mods and admins with jurisdiction in that sub forum and usually stealth, al, or I catch it pretty fast.

 

I'm going to turn on approvals for all new users, since the email thing doesn't seem to be working as well as hoped. I am not at home now, but as soon as I can sit down this afternoon/evening, I'll get it taken care of.

On a slightly different note, we don't restrict mods to certain forums- if they want to be on more than one, or even all, we'll do it- but we try not to overwhelm any one person, and make them feel like they HAVE to read every forum- so in the past we've tried to let them tell us which forums they want to moderate. But if they ask for more, we'll add them.

 

New User Moderation is on now, but it's a little hard to tell sometimes which is a spammer and which is not. So if any gets through, just report them and we'll get rid of it.

 

I'm running some vb based sites now, and I can tell you in the admin panel there is an option called "Spam Management"

Within it, you can enable Akismet spam filtering. If anything looks like spam, it gets flagged and requires a moderator to approve before it's posted.

Simply enable this option, and set the limit to only look at users first 20 posts or so, and that will take care of all the spam we see.

This is built into vBulletin!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akismet

 

That would be great, if either 1) we had that or 2) my permissions were high enough to see it(I'm not sure which is actually the case here). Believe me, I would have found that already if I had access to it. I'm assuming that we aren't updated enough for those options(but I haven't actually looked specifically for this). I actually spoke with someone at IB about this, and the only suggestion they had for me was to turn on user moderation.

 

it's an admin only option, it wouldn't be in the mod panel....

if this is an old version of vb, there are APIs available, you'd just cut and paste the code into the save post function to detect spam. More work though than just enabling the option though.

 

I only use the admin panel- and it's not there

 

The version used here is vBulletin® v3.6.4. The upgrade to 3.7.3 might be free, at worst $200.

 

lets take up a collection for the update. I'd throw you guys some $$$ if it would help

 

I don't think that would help- I'm fairly sure IB can afford to do whatever they need to this place- just have to get their attention. I'll keep working on it, and see what happens. In the meantime, this is taking all of 5-10 minutes out of my day to approve/lookup new users, so we'll just stuck with that for now.

 

And it seems to be working. I don't think I've seen any spam in several days. I don't don't know about the others.

 

It can be hard to tell which users are spammers. A lot seem fairly plausible that they're legit users. They even enter hobbies, AIM screen names, etc.

But yes, the site seems clean lately. So it's working. I just prefer automated systems to manual labor when possible Thanks for the hard work Elara.

 

Who is, and who isn't using FireFox??
add the "no script" add-on...all is good.

 

I use the AdBlock Plus add-on. I don't see any of the ads.

 

beebub cant spell