Faster reporting.

[Olle P]

Now I have to wait for three minutes between reporting each ad spammer, which feels like a pretty long time given how many spammers there are to report some days.
Please reduce the delay to one minute or so.

Cheers
Olle

[Olin Coles]

I had no idea there was a delay, so please accept my apology for the inconvenience.
For reference, when you report one spammer we search the entire forum for more. Thank you for your service to the forum!

[Bruce Normann]

Hi Olle,

With you in Western Europe, me on the East coast and Olin on the West coast, we cast a pretty wide net for picking these things up. I usually log in first thing in the morning and wipe out everything that came in during the night. It's certainly a help to have you out there ahead of me, spotting all the fakes. Thanks again, from me.

Best Regards, Bruce.

[XJnine]

I never even noticed the ability to flag things until Olle posted this. I'll hit them when I can and hopefully we can make this a place that spammers don't even want to target.

[Olin Coles]

I must accept some of the blame, because as much as I know about running websites and the related nuances, I'm rather green when it comes to vBulletin.

So if anyone wants to suggest some tools to make screening the spammers a little easier, but all means share.

[Olle P]

... hopefully we can make this a place that spammers don't even want to target.Unfortunately that's very unlikely to ever happen. :(
The spammers use automated scripts to create accounts and postings. What might work is to have some version of the forum engine that the script can't fool.

The forum I ran used a very old engine resulting in loads of fake new members for each real person that signed up. Since it was very low real activity it was no sweat for me to simply lock the forum from accepting new members and have any interested new applicant mail me an application request instead. The engine didn't allow me to create accounts for new members, so I then had to open the forum for applications and wait until the new member had created his account before closing it again.
That's a very efficient filter with a minimum of false positives. The downsides are that it will probably deter a couple of otherwise would-be members and it's infeasible if there are many new (real) members each week.

Cheers
Olle

[Daryl Greene]

What about the captcha thing? Either for signing up or maybe to allow a post to be placed?

[Olle P]

It does provide some protection, but AFAIK has to be implemented within the forum engine.
It's a nice thing to have when creating new accounts, but too much of a nuisance if required for every post.

Cheers
Olle

[Olin Coles]

There's something going on here, for sure. After Olle reported some porn spam, I came to the forum and requested to show new posts. Oddly enough, it didn't show any of the spam as new. I had to look over posts from the past 24 hours to discover almost 20 spam posts.

[RagingShadow07]

Looking through the several spam topics out now, I think it may cut down on the spam-removal work if you could, say, limit topic names, so someone can't post the exact same topic in 5 different forums. Not sure if that's possible, but I imagine it'd be a bit easier on the ones removing the spam.

[Steven Iglesias-Hearst]

I believe we share a common problem with the rest of the internet......

Enhanced image verification: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=132482
Fighting spam with vBulletin: http://www.forummonkeys.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12715