What is there to be done about spammers joining your forum? We have email verification on as well as the anti bot verification but we still get lots of spammers joining. Most of them don't post they just join and add their URL in their profile.
I could eliminate the option to add URLs but I would like our members to share theirs. I also like it because I know which members to delete.
On that note though there are a lot of new members who join that deffinately seem bogus but don't post a URL. Any idea why?
Are there any sites or orginizations that fight this sort of thing?
I couldn't find any and was thinking of starting a site to fight this.
One thought I had was to have a section where people could post the URL of spamming sites and we could contact the sites or even better post the contact info for the site owner and all the p!$$ed forum owners could send them hundereds of angry emails.
I am ready to fight this thing and would love to get some input and see how many people are as frusterated as I am.

For some reason ..there seems to be an increase in these sort of "spammers" lately. The ones who register just to get thier url in the profile.

On one small forum I run for some authors.. I had to go to admin verification.

I started noticing a pattern in some emails..
spambob.net
gawab.com
cashette.com

all seemed to be spammers..so I banned all emails from there. I haven't had any "real" members complain that they can't register..so I think no one else uses those email hosts.

I had banned usernames with certain key words ..but now they all seem to be registering with a first initial and last name. They must take classes in this stuff??

Bottom line.. I agree.. it's an annoying problem.

I use a captcha plugin + email verification on all of my forum/blog registrations. It cuts down on a LOT of the spammer signups so I just delete the few that get through by hand.

I use a captcha plugin + email verification on all of my forum/blog registrations. It cuts down on a LOT of the spammer signups so I just delete the few that get through by hand.

I do the same as you but its getting a to be a pain in the neck, what forums do you use phpbb?

A combination of SMF and phpBB, depending on how much traffic we think the forum will generate.

I have been having major problems with this also. Everytime one of them signs up and verifies there email and posts I ban the email address/domain and here is my current ban list for this reason

@web.de putoncondoms.com mail333.com onlymail2007.com fromru.com .ru super-mail.info mega-mail.info vipdoctor@gala.net xenoksok@anagl.info best-finance.biz terra-mail.info lopigax.com anagl.info osfind.info oxidiser.net sput.info gawab.com goresxa.com pspdrive.net uscreditdepot.com nudism-8.com ua.fm zone-freestuff.com spivare.com nudists-8.com best-ringtones-online.info etradeoil.com mymail-in.net

the Cashette one i get all the time but they never verify so I was trying to avoid banning a domain that the bot didn't own. I guess I will add that to the list also. Anyone come up with any new spam/antibot plugins to stop this?

Forum spamming has increased 10 fold since 2005. I own CarForums.net, and on a daily basis myself and my moderators delete numerous threads.

You have to install a few hacks that will greatly reduce your spam each day such as not allowing new members to post a link until they have reached 5 or more posts. That reduced our spam count greatly.

Yes, it became a huge problem for me too, so I ended up installing some mods (both on phpbb and vbulletin) and it took care of 95% of the spam.