What to do with spammers?

**Kaigan** · 08-05-2009, 01:36 PM

Let's say you recognise a forum spammer working the usual sites (DP, webmaster-talk, etc..) and now they're moved into your blog or forum. You have their e-mail address and IP. The obvious course of action is to ban but are there other..more unpleasant methods of revenge on these acai-berry sucking dung beetles?

**dWhite** · 08-09-2009, 12:02 PM

Most of the spam are just bots, and not humans, so it's not as much pleasure playing with them if they aren't actually people. :P

**pappasaa** · 08-12-2009, 03:30 PM

blacklist their IP

**serandfae** · 08-12-2009, 11:47 PM

That's the most effective method.

To answer your other question, though, I have in the past taken said e-mail addresses, put them in mailto: links and put them up on a personal web page for spambots to pick up, seeing as how the bots seem to love both personal web pages and mailto: links, and can't resist the two together. The idea is that while they probably don't receive messages at those addies their bandwidth gets clogged with spam. And it's perfectly legal.

I really don't know if that works, or if I'd recommend it (it's more of a therapeutic exercise, probably) but I will say that without any other filters in place at the time the spam went WAY down.

tim

**Dave@Hivelociy** · 08-13-2009, 12:50 AM

There isn't much fun to had with them anymore these day. Our forum gets the occasional bomb dropped on it but we validate every post before it gets stuck. the last large one that I can recall was 2900 or so posts in just a few seconds.

**puffin** · 08-13-2009, 12:48 PM

There aren't much we can do about it about spam bots. Good thing is WP has nice plugin which catch most of those spam comments.

**simituck** · 08-13-2009, 11:52 PM

there is a button in most forums nowadays, that is "report"!! Go ahead!

**cindyfowler** · 08-16-2009, 07:22 AM

install spam-insertor may be a usefull method,i had used a kind of spam-insertor named wp-spamfree,i think you google it and try it

**dWhite** · 08-17-2009, 01:39 PM

A few good sites and plugins that will help you if you run WordPress:

http://akismet.com/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ban/
http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/

**kimkiroo** · 08-19-2009, 04:40 AM

Actually, Report button could actually work if your users pay attention on spams and reported it. I own a forum but it really needs a time to work on it because of the spam PM's and threads/posts they created.

**thesal** · 08-20-2009, 03:23 AM

Maybe, u could take the anti-spammy feature into your site building process. Such as some Wp plugins when people comment, they have to write verified codes first.

Those easy details will help u a lot to protect from those spammers.