I've had phpBB as my forum for several months. This is a very small forum with very little action. A week or so ago, I got a flurry of new signups. After closer inspection, they looked fishy, with screen names containing "viagra" and "ciallis". Mine is a little regional forum for a pet-friendly event in Northern California. There isn't anything there of interest to goofballs.

Last week I decided to migrate my forum to SMF cuz I like all the fun features. The forum had been up for less than 48 hours when the Russians found it. I've had 6 Russian signups since yesterday on SMF and another 4 on the old phpBB board. What do they want? How are they finding me? HEELLLPP!!!!!

They are spam bots.

http://www.stopforumspam.com/ has a listing of all forum spammers with correspending usernames, emails, IP address and country of origin.

Thanks. I'll check it out. So what do they hope to gain? Are they trying to get access to my members so they can spam them? Is there something else I'm missing here?

Motives are unknown, but they can certainly ruin your reputation with internet peoples and search engines as both don't like spam.

But if they're there... how to stop them? ban every single one of them?

Originally Posted by dWhite

Motives are unknown, but they can certainly ruin your reputation with internet peoples and search engines as both don't like spam.

They can't hurt me if I don't let them in, right? Luckily, I'm on the full hosted version of SMF. I've been following a thread on another forum by someone who has the free version, but pays for hits somehow. The spam bots have run his bill up to $30 per month. (My full-fledged hosting service is only costing me $5.) Unfortunately his forum is huge and well established. It would take him forever to migrate, since he doesn't have access to his database on his free service. It's a real drag for him.

Originally Posted by yuechen

But if they're there... how to stop them? ban every single one of them?

That's what I'm doing right now, but SMF has extra security modules I can install when I have time, like "Are you human?" Whatever you're using probably has something similar.

They are spam bots like someone else has said, ive had a bout of them on my forum, check your forum security, make sure people veryfy their email address and make sure u have ur captcha turned on, simple ways to put them off !

Woc

Just delete them, people are going to always find way to spam your forums, all you can do is fight against them and captcha helps a lot.

It's a *****. I had to close my local forum for fear of causing a big issue. I was getting huge amounts of WoW gold spam which I would just delete as quick as I could. Then I started getting adult spam which was just brutal. Came so fast I couldn't get rid of it quick enough.

Captcha and e-mail verification don't help those bots that really smart. The best way is verification questions (What year is this year? what planet do we live on? etc). Bots (thank goodness) don't have intelligence just yet.

SMF 2.0 RC1 I think has this feature, otherwise, there is a modification that I've installed on my SMF 1.1.8 that works like a charm. No bots in 4 days. Pretty sweet huh?

If you're using other forums, look for modifications like what I've suggested. Or, if your code-savvy, code it yourself.

Yeah, and you might even want to have image questions too, where you have three images and ask them to click on the right one. I can't imagine any bot being able to answer that type of question.

You could look at your server logs to find a way to block them, or you could limit access to the site from the few IP blocks in your area. Looking at your logs will tell you what these are or you can look it up using tools that will tell you these things. Since it a small regional forum, this should be easy.