vBulletin and spammers

[Guard Dog]

As an FYI - There are spammers-galore out there who have recently automated their spamming into vBulletin forums.

What to watch for:

1. Simple posts like 'I agree', 'bump', and many others.

2. No posts at all, but lots of signups


You may want to edit your templates to keep signatures from being shown inside of the user profile portion of your forum. The reason for these posts is to spam their signature link(s). They are getting VERY creativer out there and we need to be vigilant so that we don't reward them without knowing!

[Engineer]

Bump.

Oh, wait...

Seriously though, thanks for the heads up.

[greek39]

Been noticing the same mostly occurring between these dates September 22 to October 4 2008. Nothing appeared targeted but looked rather random/automated. Several V’s were affected mainly pushing Pxxn and ViaGxx. I suppose both get along with one another lol.

BTW: Google search "vBulletin and spammers" this board is ranking good! Currently showing 4th out of 250,000 results.

The member signing up right now SmooveteFrego just may have spam intentions.

greek39

[Guard Dog]

Yes, we rank for anything we post about We worked fairly hard on good SEO for the forums.

As far as new members, let's let them post before calling them spammers While you might be right, I'd hate to offend someone before they even get a chance to post. Besides, I'd guess there are a few pharma and other industries who will be giving Casinos a try.

[greek39]

let's let them post before calling them spammers

I agree AGD feeling a bit trigger happy.

greek39

[Guard Dog]

I agree AGD feeling a bit trigger happy.

greek39

Yeah, it happens I understand the urge because these spammers make us all nuts!

[sipka]

I think it's not just Vbulletin forums, my SMF forum got lots of signups lately, the bots got so smart to pass the captcha and post a message with a link to the website where you can buy the automated bots for forum posting.
LOL I found it funny first time - what an amazing thing for fully automated marketing lol - but I'm having some plus work now to get rid of the nice bots