In need of assistance (xenforo spam)

[vayanui8]

I am a moderator on a small zelda fansite known as wiizelda.net, and we are having a rather large problem. There has been a person spamming our forums and creating new account whenever we ban them. He just changes his ip whenever we ban it. The forums use xenforo. Does anybody have any ideas for a permanent solution, or are we just going to keep waiting for the owner to wake up during his strange timezone and delete a bunch of spam threads every night.

 

[DinohScene]

"with a 10-71 in south central"

Humm, honestly... I think you're better off asking TJ_cool or Costello about that.
Or you could just set up a word filter which doesn't allow certain keywords to be posted that the spammer uses.
Or just take registration offline for a while ;]

 

[vayanui8]

This is getting really bad. He's made 3 of these bullshit accounts in the past 24 hours
edit: This is just one of our subforums and all the crap he's filled it with.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

I don't think there is anything you can do.

We had a member (we probably still do) who went by the name of Kirito Kun. He just kept making new accounts. P1ng just kept deleting his accounts. I think he gave up on registering though.

 

[vayanui8]

Dang, I was really hoping that wasn't the case. This guy is persistent and its getting really irritating having to delete a whole bunch of threads and posts every day

 

[Hells Malice]

Yeah a forum I moderate(d) on had a pedophile who kept remaking and trolling a specific forum or two. Even with the cops involved nothing ever stopped this guy from posting.
The internet can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.

I think Dinoh has the right idea with taking down registration. if it's just a small forum you probably wouldn't lose too much traffic I assume, and could put a note up as to why registration is down too so people know.

 

[FAST6191]

Xenforo and every other forum that considers itself halfway modern should have a spambot button. A quick search says xenforo has had one since 2010.
http://xenforo.com/help/spam/ (at the bottom). Your admin might have to make it available to moderators though.

Similarly you can manually approve registrations in most forums

Sadly I do not see the invisible ban option (you press it and the user does not know they have been banned, nobody else will know they are posting) but a three click solution is probably suitable for what you want.

 

[vayanui8]

The problem is now somewhat solved since the owner now gave all staff the banning perms. I was able to get rid of him most recent accounts quickly before he caused any damage

 

[DinohScene]

You could also block disposable emails from signing up.
onewaymail.com is an example of such.

Spammers use those emails all the time.

 

[Costello]

if it's just a single person, the solution is easy: they will eventually get tired of it
that person must be very sad for spamming forums, even sadder if it goes on for days
but even the most lowly human beings have their limits, they'll eventually find something better to do with their time.

The bigger concern we have is spam in general, there doesn't seem to be a good way to prevent it other than having a human manually validate registrations.

 

[BORTZ]

You just need a mod like P1ng to remove him.