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Does spam ever make you want to quit?

Shawn Gossman

Shawn Gossman

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Do you ever deal with so much spam that you consider quitting forums?

If yes, what keeps you motivated and staying put?

If no, how do you avoid that feeling?
 
It used to make me want to quit but I feel like spam prevent has really improved since the early forum days.
 
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Cedric said:
Agreed. Occasionally you see a spammer in the approval queue. Back in the day if you weren't around on your forum for a few hours, you'd need to clean up literally hundreds of posts. 😅 And all manually too.
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I have about 20 to 30 a day on my cycling forum. They never get past the moderation que but some link somewhere is drawing them in. I don't have that issue on any other forum I run.
 
Cedric said:
Still that much now? I ban around 15 spammers averagely on FP on a daily basis. On Administrata there's days when we don't see any spammer. Then there's days we see 5-6 spammers.
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Yeah. I'm not sure why they're hitting the bike forum.
 
Shawn Gossman said:
I have about 20 to 30 a day on my cycling forum. They never get past the moderation que but some link somewhere is drawing them in. I don't have that issue on any other forum I run.
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Have you checked your analytics logs or Google search console to see where they could possibly be coming in from?

The referral track could help you pin point it.

I’d also discourage their ip ranges, so they can’t even make an account.
 
FD gets a lot of spam registrations and spam through "Add your forum", even with hardening it. I don't use Cloudflare because I just never liked the idea of it; it probably has to be one of the largest training models for AI by now, with everyone caching everything.

I don't see the same issue on my general forum, though.

It's odd how spambots will choose to attack one forum over another.
 
frm said:
FD gets a lot of spam registrations and spam through "Add your forum", even with hardening it. I don't use Cloudflare because I just never liked the idea of it; it probably has to be one of the largest training models for AI by now, with everyone caching everything.

I don't see the same issue on my general forum, though.

It's odd how spambots will choose to attack one forum over another.
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Today it seems like AAF got quite a few. A lot of them successfully joined a posted, too!
 
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Shawn Gossman said:
Today it seems like AAF got quite a few. A lot of them successfully joined a posted, too!
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The only thing I can conclude is that it's the footer link. It's much easier for spambots to find a XF forum by searching "Community platform by XenForo" (which is how I populated FD, with other forums like myBB/phpBB, etc. too).

But the general forum is branding-free, so there have been like 1 or 2 spam accounts, ever. Maybe 1 or 2 were human, so 4 if you count those. It was also online for much longer as well.

Neither is on Cloudflare, and both have the same protection (just measly hCaptcha).

Although, FD and AAF share similar keywords too. So, it could be niche targeting.
 
frm said:
The only thing I can conclude is that it's the footer link. It's much easier for spambots to find a XF forum by searching "Community platform by XenForo" (which is how I populated FD, with other forums like myBB/phpBB, etc. too).

But the general forum is branding-free, so there have been like 1 or 2 spam accounts, ever. Maybe 1 or 2 were human, so 4 if you count those. It was also online for much longer as well.

Neither is on Cloudflare, and both have the same protection (just measly hCaptcha).

Although, FD and AAF share similar keywords too. So, it could be niche targeting.
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It would be nice if XF used an image for the footer link instead. An image that linked to them. I wonder if that would help. You could effectively change the path of the image as long as it links to them.
 
Shawn Gossman said:
It would be nice if XF used an image for the footer link instead. An image that linked to them. I wonder if that would help. You could effectively change the path of the image as long as it links to them.
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It wouldn't matter because they probably wouldn't use a unique file name for the image and keep an intact alt/title attribute. Also, the link on the image would link back to XenForo. All of which would be easy to scrape, harder as you can't search images, but easy to determine after a while.

Additionally, the link back to XenForo would probably be the dead giveaway because you could find all XenForo's backlinks and then work from there to scrape those sites to see if they're (still) active forums. However, the backlinks take a bit more time to populate, so it'd give a new forum some days/weeks before it would be hit, if the method to get listed is a footer link.

I can only come to the anecdotal evidence that it is by using forums with and without the XF footer.
 
It's just something we have to keep on combatting I suppose.

It's nowhere as bad as it used to be. I can deal with it.
 
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