How many bots get through ?

[Mike Edge]

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/foolbothoneypot-bot-killer-spam-combat.1085/ is one of the best investments I ever made for my site. Since adding it about 7 months ago I think 3 spammers have gotten threw. all of which were human, not bots.

 

[meetdilip]

Did anyone report that they were not able to register at your website ?

 

[agandl]

An occasional human spammer, less than 1 a month now - the site is set up so no-one can put links in their first post so they just sit there until I delete them.

zappaDPJ - I used to get a similar result regarding medication on one of my WP sites

 

[PacMan]

Ok, so how many spammers get through ? Do you place any moderation of IP or pre marking of spammers ?

On some of my forums I ban certain countries.

 

[Sysnative]

Attempts: Couple of thousand a day.
Successes: Maybe one a month? Two if it's a bad month?

vB4 forum - www.sysnative.com

 

[Alundra]

Honestly I haven't seen one get through in over a year. In fact only two have ever got through and they only got through because no one knew about them - they were discovered later. My other spam blocking methods must have stopped them from posting and being caught by me.

 

[Xorlof]

We had a big spammer problem a while back. We had basic countermeasures in place that did very well blocking the thousands of bot attempts, but we still had about 50 human registrations daily. (The spam was humorously poorly targeted. Our forum members are primarily male and the spam traffic was most often for things like high-end high heels, handbags, and makeup). The staff was amazing at squashing the spam very quickly as it appeared, but we wanted it gone. Looking at our legitimate traffic, we determined it was safe to block the main countries of origin of the human spammers except for the Philippines (there we just put some targeted IP bans, rather than country-wide). That brought our spam traffic down to one every few days. There was much rejoicing.

Not content with that result, we then added a simple, forum-topic-knowledge-required-Q&A which eliminated the rest of the spammers. IMPORTANT: we then checked to see if this system had a negative impact on legitimate registrations. It did. A small one, but that was unacceptable. We discovered the problems, tweaked the questions and rechecked. We were then back to previous new user registration levels. There was more rejoicing.

The only spammer we've had in over a year was when I disabled the Q&A plugin for an upgrade and forgot to turn it back on.