Spammers are getting worse again

[Bifford]

FYI -

I'm getting fed up of users who are trying to be smart - they have links to websites in their posts that are hidden through the use of colour. You should know that I use "StopForumSpam.com" to check whether your username/ip/email address is listed as a spammer. I have left a good half dozen posters alone this past few months because they appear to be genuine users, with some of their posts actually responding properly to threads.

However I have now decided to get tough - if you have "hidden links" in your posts you can expect that post to be deleted as soon as I see it, whether the content is genuine or not. Three strikes and you get a ban.

There are posts, such as the one directly above this post, that appear genuine but have the hidden link. I will be "Flag"ing those posts, which means ANY TIME the user posts I get a notification. If that user continues to post with hidden links I will "one click ban" them, which means all their posts get shredded and their account is banned.

Also, there have been a lot of posts such as "I agree!" or "Thank you for the good post!" - all these are being made by people on the StopForumSpam register and ALL of these will be deleted when I see them and the user banned.

Further - I have the ability to EDIT posts. I can remove your links. I do not like doing this but I will if need be.

So if you are one of those people I suggest you close your forum account and go away, because you are not going to get anywhere here.

Sam / Bifford.

[Admiror Joomla! Sponsor]

[Bifford]

I just want to let all of Admiror's *proper* users (if there are any left!) know that I keep playing and tweaking with the forum settings to TRY to stop all these bastard spammers getting on and posting. I can officially say that I hate phpbb for forums (I use mybb in my own) - it's not intuitive in the slightest.

I tried setting the "new user authorisation" to "email admin for auth" but I didn't get any emails come through (presumably the owners did) so I had to change that back to "self auth". The Captur settings don't appear to stop them at all either.

The past week I've tried playing with the "Newly register user group" permissions so they can't post without my authorisation, but nothing I do there takes hold and comes into effect.

So I'm sorry that currently 95% of the posts are spam. I delete them and the account the second I see them. It's a never-ending chore currently.

I will keep trying to sort it, but I'm not the owner, and I can't upload any plugins etc to try to combat it.

(I've just banned a dozen IPs, several of which I noticed keep registering with random names.)

Best regards,
Sam / Bifford

[Vasiljevski]

Long time since I was here

I never received any mails regarding the user registration, so that is weird.

I'm considering the option to dump this forum and use something else, but that depends on my time.

Also, I need to switch to another hosting, that's also waiting for few months now, since the current one will not update PHP version to 7.1 I decided to move.
But still haven’t made the migration

So, today I managed to made some improvements on the gallery, and let the moderator know on Joomla Extensions, so hopefully we will be published again

[Bifford]

Since I found the IPs of the 3 main culprits the spam has practically ceased which is lovely!