Method of decreasing spam

Have you been banning the spammers?
yes, always ban spammers usually before moving the posts so that they can't continue.

Spammers are getting smarter and finding out ways to get around the measures that forums have in place to stop the spam, you have to be on your toes and be aware of what they are doing. Honestly, like I said before, I don't think there is a lot more we could do other than add more mods and keep doing what we are doing to clean up the spam. And of course relying on the members to report it.

true, I know all too well that the measure I just suggested will only result in image spam to get around keyword filtering.

I hope there's a master list of keywords somewhere. Judging from the amount of different types of spam we have removed lately, it would be a major pain to have to make one up. . .
to be honest I think that we could make our own.
and we probably wouldn't want a list.

I don't think that there would be a global list of words since some forums would allow certain things and others wouldn't.

just adding a long list of words will probably cause more pan than having a select list of the 'kind' of spam that we see...

as I said, we're seeing a reasonable amount of spam for a computer supplier.
we see spam for viagra
wow gold as pointed out about is another one.
anything that says young = teen = sex is probably going to want to be disallowed either.

but this all depends on whether the keyword filter can be enabled to disallow posting for certain words, not just text replace with stars...
because then we'll still be doing just as much manual work to remove the spam.
 
Lol, it never ends.

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Lol, it never ends.

25r048k.png

I find this pretty ironic..

EDIT:
I just thought of something else. On my blog, I use Akismet to filter comment spam and it does a great job. Is there some kind of plugin similar to Akismet but optimized for a forum? It seems like it would kind of defeat the purpose of a forum if every post didn't show up instantly but is it possible that right before posting, a message could be displayed saying "Scanning for spam.." for a few seconds while it quickly looks over the post for things such as too many links, "spammy" words etc?
 
there's already a very slight delay in posting to post showing, I don't think that increasing this by a second or so to scan content will be an issue.

that's basically what I'm saying we need, a comment filter.

but instead of one that take the words "buy viagra here". and replaces it with "buy ****** here", we need one that displays a message saying your comment could not be posted, please read out AUP.

it will take time... and just like most swear filters, determined individuals will try to get around it. and when they do, all we need to do is add another keyword to the list,

so we end up banning the word
shit
SHIT
Shit
5hit
Sh1t
5h1t
etc until we've got a list that can't really be compromised.

as already said centralcomputers dot com could be a prime candidate for this list. their not a big supplier, just a random spammer.

as far as I know no member here has or will buy from there, and should anyone ever ask why they can't link to that site, or why if they try they can't post then we can all tell them it's because they spam the crap out of forums and non of us would touch them with a proverbial barge poll.

a double whamy, we get rid of spam, and we make it known that when/if you spam our site we won't do business with you, and actively advise others not to either because of your bad business practices.

I can't imagine anyone asking for advice on say trainers and listing several brands in one post, so perhaps if the filter could look at brand names and frequency on a single post it might be able to make an intelligent decision.
 
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