If you look at my forum's member page, you'll notice a large increase in registrations for a board it's size:
http://www.conspiracy-forums.com/mem...joindate&pp=25

I'm fairly certain they're spammers. Just look at their usernames, or profile fields, for that matter. They all seem like gibberish so far. And all their info on the profile pages are virtually identical ("Biography: Man" and Name, interests, AND the RSS feed fields are all their usernames too).

They haven't posted anything yet, so I can't see the IP they're coming from. Any tips on what to do about them?

Oddly some of those same usernames just became members of my forum in the last couple of days. As soon as I can tell it's a spammer I delete the account. Often if you search Google for the username you'll find a long list of forum profiles. That's a pretty good sign it's spam. Check their account info on the admin side of vB. Sometimes you can tell by the email address used at registration or some of the other info that was used at registration.

You can also set up your registration so it requires the double opt in email. New users will need to click the link in the email they receive before they can do anything with their account. When the spammer signs up they'll show as being registered, but they'll be in a user group with no privileges until they confirm the email.

You can add the image capcha (or increase the difficulty) on sign up, though I think most have been broken already.

If you notice spammers coming from the same or similar IPs, you can block the IP.

In the end you probably can't keep spammers from registering, but you can keep them from posting.

Is it better to physically delete the accounts from the database? Or just ban them (despite them not doing anything)?

I already do have the captcha image verification feature enabled. And I just turned on the opt-in email link verification feature. We'll see if that helps.

Unfortunately though, I don't have access to their IP addresses via adminCP, just the postbit, I think that's all vB offers out of the box. And all their email addresses are different (all gmail accounts though).

modcp on VB should show you the registration address.
Some of those usernames are fairly similar to some WoW gold spammers and a bunch of Chinese spammers who were dropping links for wigs and silk dresses over at WeLoveCSS.
Don't know why they bother, their crap only lasts a few hours at longest and is usually gone in minutes

James I just ban them and don't worry about removing their accounts from the database. I figure leaving them in the system makes it look like the forum has more members, which could make it more appealing to real people thinking of signing up.

Just to offer a comparison, if you look at the home page of WT and scroll down you'll see we have 64,848 registered members. If you click on the link at the top showing all members you'll see a count of 57,704. The difference is banned members don't show up on the member list. So 11% of WT members have been banned, the majority of which were likely spammers. I'd bet most forums would show a similar % of spammers/registered members.

In WT's case 57,000+ members is still a lot. In your and my forum the extra % makes us look busier and more active.

Are you sure about the IP being unavailable. My vB installation is out of the box and when I search for IPs it shows the registration IP. Most spammers are going through proxies so you probably won't see the same IPs anyway.

I've looked through both mod and admin cps and don't see the IP's of members anywhere, just the email addresses. The only place I've ever noticed the IP number was in their postbits (through the computer icon).

I do see how the higher number look more appealing, which is why I asked about banning vs. deletion (I was leaning toward banning to begin with too ).

Ban their IP address. Also delete them from the database. You should probably get a fresh list of proxies from proxy.org and put those in the banned list. If someone is using a proxy to check out your forum they are probably up to no good.

Hi there

If they aint posted anything it wouldnt bother me to be honest, if u go into admin and search for a user and click their name, there is a signup ip field on that screen, you have to scroll down a bit.

If you worried ban the ip, i get a lot of these kind of users, i make them verify their email addresses, spammers usually dont do this, they try to register and post straight away, so often leave ur forum when they realise they have to verify, so they have probably left never to return anyhow.

I usually prune my users, and get rid of any accounts that havent been used in 90 days, and that gets rid of these kind of accounts that dont get used and keeps any spam that you might miss off ur site.

Woc

Like I said I don't have access to their IP's. They haven't posed yet.

A few more registered today, and if I knew what the number was I would surely ban the IP address.

you should ban their IP

James you can find their IPs by logging into adminCP. Select Users from the menu on the left and then "search for users by IP" Then you just search on the username and you should get all the IPs the user has posted from along with the IP they registered with.

Also when viewing an individual user on the admin side it should show the IP they used to register toward the bottom of the left hand column.

If you don't see either of the above check your vB settings. I thought the IP stuff is on by default and it's been in vB for awhile now.

One reason you may not be seeing the info is you may not be logging into the admin cp as a user with full permissions. You should be, but if you created a different username for yourself that wasn't the initial one you used to install vB your account may not have full admin privileges. Only the account that installs vB will have all privileges by default. The rest will have a subset of full privileges unless the master account enables more.

OK thanks Steve, I can see their IP addresses that way.

I did a search on all these "new users" and they ALL have different IPs (likely meaning registration through a proxy server). I'm at the "Ban User" screen in my AdminCP, but there aren't any "Ban IP" options, just banning users.

Is there is a way to physically ban the IP through the adminCP? Even if there is though, I'm thinking it won't make much difference, and I'd be just fine banning the user regularly.

Most of the time spammers will be going through proxies or a bot net and the won't register through the same IP. One way to discover if someone is a spammer is to search the username in Google. If all the results are forum profiles you've found a spammer.

Sometimes you want to be careful banning an IP because a spammer could be going through an honest person's computer and you'll be ultimately banning that person. Spammers are less likely to use the same IP over and over.

You can ban IPs through the general vBulletin Options. Open the list of options and select User Banning Options. You can list all the IPs you want there. You can also block IPs through .htaccess or your hosting control panel.

The email verification you turned on is going to stop them from posting. Automated spam most likely isn't going to be logging into email accounts to activate the account. That doesn't prevent them from registering and showing as your latest user, but you could remove that from displaying if it's an issue.

All forums have spam accounts. It's not really a big deal unless the spammers can post. And as you've no doubt seen here you don't have to be a spammer to leave a useless post.

I've seen a sudden burst of spammer threads popping up on the vb help forums latey.
Here is a thread from vb.com
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...73&postcount=3
I would suggest adding a question that only the ppl going to your forum would know.
Like for this site, it would be.

What is another name for admin that starts with a "w" = webmaster

Thanks for the link Brandon. I knew captcha was being broken, but I guess it finally crossed a tipping point. Looks like the ability to set up spam emails at gmail and hotmail did the trick.

I'm going to take some of the advice from vB and see about locking down my forum a little better. I've been banning the spammers as they arrive, but there's no way I can keep up with the automation.

OK yeah, this is getting out of control. I don't mind seeing a few new registrations, as it helps increase the forums numbers a bit. But when the number inorganically spikes like this, it's not very healthy for the forum.

I haven't upgraded to vB 3.7 yet, so I'm not sure if I have access to the question feature or not (don't see it anywhere off-hand, I'm looking under "User Registration Options", but it's not there).

I'm not sure if upgrading to vB 3.7 is the best thing to do though either, I never really needed to. (And, WT hasn't even upgraded yet.) Plus not quite sure if it changes will make to the templates, customization compatibilities, etc.

James I set things up through vBulletin Options => Human Verification Manager (which is one of the menu items on the left). I'm not sure if that's a 3.7 thing or not.

The Q&A should be there in pre 3.7 versions. For the moment I switched my forum to use recaptcha and it stopped the spam completely. I'm preparing a list of questions for the Q&A too, since I assume recaptcha will be broken before too long as well.

I was hit with all these bots too. I was deleting them at first, but realized they were re-registering with the same email addresses and usernames so then I started banning. I didn't want to leave them on there because I hate having my database clogged up with that many spam users and they had posted their links in a user profile field. (I don't understand why you'd want spam users boosting your forum numbers. ) Banning all of them was a lot of work, though, so I ended up going to vbulletin.org for help. I installed Stop the Bots (listed as a 3.7 mod but also works on 3.6 - it's very simple) and now only a few get through each day (vs. 50-100+) I just delete those at my leisure. Banning IPs, IMO, is a waste of time.

I was already using Check4Spam (available for 3.6 and 3.7) and it keeps 99% of spam from ending up on the forum in the first place. I highly recommend it!! Even though the bots were able to register, they weren't able to post. With both mods in place I don't have to worry about registrations or posts.

You should be able to view all visitors ips via your web host.