Spam prevention?

[Sven J]

Hi there,

Currently several subfora are massively being spammed by some obscure airline hogwash.

Is it possible to block this, maybe by a more specific "favorite theme/recently bought set" query during account setup?

This spamming really is a nuisance, as it puts serious topics far down the list. So any measure to prevent this would be greatly appreciated.

[Coryo]

Yeah, it seems really bad at the moment.

Maybe there should be a 24-hour restriction on new accounts creating new topics, that might mitigate it a little.

[jimmynick]

Yes, it's remarkably irritating. In the meantime I'm just reporting every such thread I see.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Thanks for the report, we are aware of it and also not happy. Seems AI helps spammers to render reCaptcha Methods useless vs bots. Funnily the spammers seem to have valid gmail accounts (account creation at google may also just be secured by reCaptcha..).

[Jim]

I would not be surprised if these are actually human spammers. Either way, very annoying.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Chances may be high its AI-assisted Bots as they are getting near the 100% rate of solving reCaptcha (v2, wide spread in the internet) already... Article from Tom's Hardware

[Jim]

Gotta love AI 

[Sven J]

So maybe a 24-hour waiting period as suggested by @Coryo would indeed be a good idea?
Or requiring new accounts to be manually activated by an admin?

[Jim]

10 minutes ago, Sven J said:

So maybe a 24-hour waiting period as suggested by @Coryo would indeed be a good idea?
Or requiring new accounts to be manually activated by an admin?

We have turned on a setting that posts for new accounts need to be approved first. Let's see how that goes.

[Sven J]

1 minute ago, Jim said:

We have turned on a setting that posts for new accounts need to be approved first.

That sounds perfect.

I only hope it doesn't mean a load of work for you.

[JesseNight]

In my days of running forums, the best way proved to be customizing the forum software. Spammers know how every forums package works and stay on top of that package's security updates to counter it. Their scripts can automatically register accounts and post simply by posting the right link and generating the correct session ID.
That used to be my key back in the days: customizing how the session ID was built in my forum software in a unique way. Of course that's not as easy as it sounds, and requires manual fixing each time the software updates (if you wanna keep following those updates that is).

TL:DR; have the forum software be different than the standard package in security and registration/posting handling so their standard scripts for this forum software no longer work. Hope this info can be of some use.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Jesse I thought already in similar ways, but I do not want to mess with coding as I have too little capacity to ongoingly support in such ways... I think the main difference to back then is LLMs and AI being able to solve all Captchas and Spam prevetion tasks with ease nowadays..

My thoughts were like "can we possibly restrict new account to get into some honeypot-forum of them falsely thinking 'I am granted to spam already' - what they may not recognize may be the fact of them just being put in some honeypot-forum, not visible to any user & there they can easily spam as they like. Based on their behavior there we could easily identify accounts which could behave and sort out the others without having the community to get bothered... But I am not even sure if such scenario may be created from the vendors possible rulesets...

[JesseNight]

Perhaps have registration ask people to introduce themselves in this honeypot-forum.
If people post a serious and plausible introduction, move it to the public forums and give them access. Otherwise leave them stuck there or ban them.
Of course that does mean extra work for admins/moderators... but I fear there's no automated way to deal with it that they cannot counter.

In the end, it remains smart to set up a custom method bc the general security updates and the most commonly used mods are well known by spammers too.

[MAB]

It looks like the spammers are back, this time temu. 

On 9/7/2025 at 10:01 AM, Jim said:

We have turned on a setting that posts for new accounts need to be approved first. Let's see how that goes.

This is obviously not working. I have just reported 20+ posts from I think four different new accounts, accounts are all less than 30 minutes old yet posting multiple copies of the same spam a minute or so apart.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Yepp, we need to find another solution. As this approval setting was annoying all Mods, we had to turn it back off again. We are annoyed as much by those spammers as you are...

@JesseNight yeah thought about such, may be simple + small enough solution for no bot-army ever getting it and just falling for it..

 

Deleted the latest spam posts *sigh

[Black Falcon]

26 minutes ago, aFrInaTi0n said:

Yepp, we need to find another solution. As this approval setting was annoying all Mods, we had to turn it back off again. We are annoyed as much by those spammers as you are...

@JesseNight yeah thought about such, may be simple + small enough solution for no bot-army ever getting it and just falling for it..

 

Deleted the latest spam posts *sigh

You missed one of the bots down in the media and event subforums - and sadly still new ones are coming up. As a short fix, as all of them are advertising the same shop, maybe it would be possible to filter new posts containing the shops name out?

[aFrInaTi0n]

Sorry, my eyes are getting old... hope I catched the misses for now.

[Jim]

Thanks @aFrInaTi0n

I am online too. Let me know if we need to hunt them down.

[Jim]

6 hours ago, MAB said:

This is obviously not working. I have just reported 20+ posts from I think four different new accounts, accounts are all less than 30 minutes old yet posting multiple copies of the same spam a minute or so apart.

Thanks!

We turned post approval for new members off the day after we turned it one. That was causing other problems.

We are working on a new way for new members to register. Or at least a different approval process.

[MAB]

6 hours ago, Jim said:

Thanks!

We turned post approval for new members off the day after we turned it one. That was causing other problems.

We are working on a new way for new members to register. Or at least a different approval process.

Makes sense. One of the admins was pretty quick to remove them. Hopefully the spammers see it disappear quickly and give up.

[Jim]

Automatic member approval has been turned off for now, so we won't see loads of spammers in the next day or two.

[aFrInaTi0n]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

Makes sense. One of the admins was pretty quick to remove them. Hopefully the spammers see it disappear quickly and give up.

I reckon they do not even have eyes... But yeah if they find their accounts fastly blocked it may lower future motivations for them.

[JesseNight]

I doubt it's a matter of motivation, because they have no people investing time and effort in this. Registrations of forum accounts and free email accounts, and spreading spam are fully automated processes for them so once a site/forum is known to them, it will keep coming until security is changed. And if it's just a forum software security patch or a common used well known security mod, they patch their end to counter it in a matter of hours up to days max.
It's an endless cat & mouse game that can only be won by either putting people on it or unique custom security that's unknown to them (they won't patch their end to counter security of 1 single forum). It's a sacrifice either way bc the first means extra work for moderators handling registrations or post approvals, and the second means extra work for the board admin and having to redo customization after forum software gets an update.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, been in the same position from 2003 til a few years ago and only 1 board remained 95% free of spam for over 15 years due to its customized generation of login tokens.

[Yperio_Bricks]

While there's another spammer going around in this very second. Do you need more people that can help flagging spammers? Sometimes there's no moderator or staff online. As a pirates regular I flagged some spammers, even if it was not my job. But if they started spamming in quick succession or started posting nudes, I flagged them myself instead of reporting. I did step back from being a regulator and lost all powers, but if you need more people keeping an eye on the spammers, I'd be happy to help. And I think others too.

 

Edited November 17, 2025 by Yperio_Bricks
typo

[aFrInaTi0n]

@Yperio_Bricks Thanks for the offer but our goal is to have a more automated way of approaching this. The latest patch included an option to use Cloudflares Turnstile service - this may be interesting and we are reading to try to go post-captcha :D