Fighting spam

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All forum administrators need to deal with forum spam from time to time. In addition to the standard forum features (like user bans and bulk message moderation), FUDforum offers a toolbox of advanced features to irritate and prevent spammers from reaching their goals. This article discusses ways and means to get a grip on spam.

Contents

Empower your users to deal with spam

Don't be a control freak and don't try to do it all by yourself. The best defence against spammers is to promote all users you trust (or have an interest in your forum's success) moderator access. Remember, they hate spam as much as you do and you won't always be around to monitor your forum.

FUDforum also supports "Account Moderators". Account moderators are allowed to update, delete and ban user accounts.

Prevent registration

Users with certain usernames, IP addresses or E-Mail addresses can be blocked (from accessing or registering on the forum). For details, see Login Filter, IP Filter and E-mail Filter.

Spammers and spambots can be blocked before they register by activating the Botscout.plugin plugin.

Administrators may want to write a unique captcha plugin for their forums. Some examples to get you started: Recaptcha.plugin, Riddlecaptcha.plugin and Mathcaptcha.plugin.

Prevent posting

Some settings you may want to enable or adjust:

Queue user's first N posts for approval. If a user's post count exceeds this number his/her posts will be automatically approved (unless posted to a moderated forum). Set to 0 to disable.
  • Messages before allowing users to post links:
Prevent new users from posting spam. Users are required to post more than this amount of messages before they can embed links into their posts.
  • Flood Trigger:
The minimum time delay, in seconds between message posting. This option is used to prevent automated posting scripts that would attempt to post many messages at once (preventing DOS and Brute Force attacks).

If you allow anonymous users to post messages, enable the posting CAPTCHA test and/or enable post moderation.

Private message spam

FUDforum 3.0.1 and higher versions allow administrators to review and delete private messages on their forums. Users posting spam can then be banned. If this doesn't help, consider disabling the Private Messaging system in your forum's Global_Settings_Manager.

Censor content

Use the forum's Replacement and Censorship System.

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