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I am turning off the new member enrollment feature for now. If you want to be a forum member, send me an email with your real name, your proposed user name, and call my store at 703-360-6399 for a short verification chat. Once you do that I will set you up. Today there were close to 100 spam posts, so no new members can automatically sign up until the spammers go find another target and leave this forum alone...
It is a shame that you have to take such a step, as folks having that first question that motivates them to action and thus joining this great forum will be basically stopped for now. Your method though is good in that it is an immediate deterrent to the spammers vs. what the Apple Community Boards had to do ultimately when they changed the underlying application / system to halt the spammers monopolizing posts.
Yes, its the best way to deal with it. There is a spammer out there who has figured out how to bulk upload his garbage for "streaming movies for free" which was most likely a malicious web site if you did (no one is giving you free first run streaming movies, click on the links and its pretty much a sure thing your computer will be infected). He's come back on three times, and yesterdays' attack had over 80 posts, it took me nearly 45 minutes to clean it all up. There were two other small spam attacks as well, but those are the typical ones that take just a minute to clean up. Since that was his third time in and he's doing bulk, large volume uploads, turning off new automated memberships is the way to stop him. He will move on to another website shortly and when I feel enough time has passed I will revert the forum back to auto-membership.
Still having a hard time with spammers, including porn. I turned the switch back on to auto enrollment and they were right back at it, so now I have it set to auto-enrollment, but new members are moderated. That means their posts will not be seen until either myself or Aaron approve them. So if you are a new forum member, know that we will have to take a look at your post and approve it before it goes public.
Duane, are you able to swap out the security captcha-type feature this forum software uses, to use another one? I don't recall what this software uses by default. But there are some good ones out there. A developer I work with said there is research showing that text and/or image recognition captchas are easy to defeat. He recommends one like this (see bottom of form) https://www.texasfcs.com/contact-us/
Feel free to delete this post if you want after reading. I can send you more info if you're interested. Just reply here or PM me.
EDIT: Found this: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...ng-lot-of-spam
EDIT2: And this... not to assume you haven't already done this http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...ring-your-site
Thanks for the tips! Unfortunately I'm not real savvy on doing all that security maintenance and technical computer things. I'm afraid I might 'break' the forum and don't have the time to dedicate to learning it or the money to hire it done. If we have anyone here on the forum that wants to volunteer to do it and knows their way around it - I'm all ears.
Still having problems with spammers, specifically porn spammers right now, and this seemed to increase when I changed the registration verification option from a question to the Captcha method, so obviously that is not a deterrent. I'm really not interested in having forum members from Russia, China, India and the like so I made it hard enough to where most foreigners won't know it and easy enough that most Americans will if they were paying attention in class during 4th grade.
I'm traveling right now.
There are some anti-spam solutions -- plugins -- that could help.
If you soft-delete any spam, it could be helpful to be able to review the IP addresses associated with the spam.
Thanks Aaron. I am headed out of country tomorrow (06/19) and will return 07-01. I think I will close off new memberships while gone, unless you want to keep watch on things to the end of the month. Thanks!