Fighting the War Against Web Site Spam Bots
The last days I have been fighting in the war against the latest spam bot soldiers like a maniac.
I own and manage over 70 web sites. This includes different forums, directories, blogs, topsites, article submission sites and you name it.
Very recently there is a new wave of spam. The default captcha for vBulletin is now not working against spam bots, also not the submission rules for the PHP Link Directory.
After winning a few combats I can now finally rest, a little.
Here are some weapons I used to fight this spam war:
PHP Link Directory version 3 or above
Follow these instructions to stop getting spam: http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46424&postcount=13
Follow these instructions to delete if you got massive amount of spam: http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46308&postcount=1
vBulletin version 3.5 and up
Follow these instructions exactly: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1193538&postcount=28
vBulletin version 3.6 and up
Install this Enhanced Captcha Image Verification: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=132482
WordPress
Install the following plugins:
If you know how to do PHP programming I recommend you to completely disable and erase trackbacks (but not pingbacks). I did that but I am afraid I don't remember how I did.
Aardvark Topsites PHP
See this post: https://www.jimwestergren.com/stop-the-topsites-spam/
This article is going to be regularly updated with the latest weapons in this war, feel welcome to bookmark it.
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Jim Westergren is a Swedish web entrepreneur currently living in Spain. He is happily married and has three lovely children. Some of his interests are web development, SEO and writing.He is the Founder of DomainStats and N.nu. Read his full about page.