I noticed somewhere you were battling spam bots

jaqie

Member
Apr 30, 2013
25
0
1
oregon
foxtecha.com
I do have a suggestion for that, though it is far from optimal.

If it is just getting way too much, you can add a robots.txt to the root directory of the website banning all search engines from indexing the site, and that will make this forum far, far less attractive to spambots since their spam will not be indexed in search engines and posting here as far as they are concerned will be posting into a black hole.

This does mean that only the site itself will show up on search engines and not the forum, so people will not have an easy time finding this...

It is a possibility to try just for short term, and remove either if it's impact is too large or if it is just decided it is not worth it. Search engines check for a robots.txt every so often and follow it's instructions once they see new ones in it.
 

Brengun

Global Moderators
Staff member
Apr 22, 2009
5,041
4
38
61
Burrum Heads, Queensland, Australia
Thank you for the tip but many of our new members came via a google search and found our forum so I don't think we'll be changing it.

No new members may post until their application is manually checked and approved so spam posts are almost non existant.

Pleco planet has on average 300 member applications per day but many are very obvious as spammer members and are deleted en-mass in lots of 25 to 50 so it doesn't really take that long to check every day. :)
 

Pirarucu

Member
Jan 6, 2010
605
2
18
Gold Coast (Queensland)
In another forum that i'm a member of, this is how they control there Spammers.

****Spam-O-Matic Statistics****

54438 Spammers Denied Registration

72 Spammers Permanently Banned

16 Spammers submitted to StopForumSpam

1222 Spammy Posts Automatically Moderated

Threads=27,406 Posts=280,954 Members=68,534

Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.1.4

I've never seen any spam on this site, so maybe Plecoplanet should look into this technique to rid the spam from this forum...just a idea.
 

bre

Member
Apr 21, 2009
2,571
1
36
Newcastle, Australia
Thanks for that.
We will have a look into it.

We are currently averaging around 300 spam members per day. But they aren't getting past the registration approval process.