How to Protect Your VBulletin Forum from Spam

Lately, vBulletin Forums have turned into prime Internet real estate for spammers and spam-bots. If you're new to moderating vBulletin forums, or if you've recently installed and published a new vBulletin forum, you're undoubtedly being inundated with spam to the point where you spend most of your time trying to eliminate or avoid these pests instead of spending your time working on management, customization, or promotion.

After successfully installing vBulletin for the first time about a month ago, I've spent the better part of the past few weeks perfecting anti-spam techniques, and now I'm down to only one or two spam requests a day. I'll share my anti-spam secrets with you to put a stop to the insanity.

Before you get started, think about your forum's subject and who it will attract. Local and national forums are easier to control than forums on topics that attract people from around the world. While reading my tips, keep your demographic audience in mind and tweak my suggestions to keep potential relevant visitors from being labeled as spam. For reference, the vBulletin forum I set up was designed to attract San Francisco Bay Area real estate agents and others interested in Bay Area real estate. Therefore, I was able to use more aggressive anti-spam techniques.

The following steps are managed in the vBulletin Admin Control Panel:

The first step is to manually accept each new user who signs up by turning on the "moderate new members" section under the user registration options in the vBulletin options drop-down. Forget any delusions of grandeur of not being able to handle an impossible flow of new-joins. Even the largest forums didn't get that all their users in one day. Once the anti-spam measures are in place, new user registration moderation will be a piece of cake.

Next is a very important step that will let the admins know right away whether a new forum member is legit or not. In the admin control panel under "user profile fields", select "add a new profile field". Select the default single-line text box and hit continue.

Here you need to come up with a seemingly important question and make it mandatory to answer. For my forum, my question was, "Where is your main area of interest, i.e., San Mateo, East Bay, etc." Whenever a legit member signs up, my notification E-mails generated by the first step now show the user's answer to my question. A legit user will have an appropriate answer, being a specific city or area.

Spammers almost always user their new username, not because they are illiterate and can't understand the question, it's because most spammers are spam-bots. These scripts are programmed to put certain responses in unfamiliar registration fields. This way, you can easily spot the phony and deny his registration.

Lastly, make sure all human verifications are turned on. Search isn't as important, but make sure the rest are checked.

Now that these measures are in place, it's time to keep spammers away from the get-go. This is where we get into spam domains, free e-mail domains, and IP addresses that need to be banned with the quickness. Going back to your audience, it's also time to consider who you want to visit your site, because the best way is to block certain countries, but we'll get to that later.

First, find a list of all known spam E-mail domains and ban them in the "user banning options" section of the main vBulletin options drop-down. Don't worry about accidentally weeding out good domains, because most of these domains are something like @spamzor.com and stick out like a sore thumb. vBulletin's forum contains a thread that has a comprehensive list that you should add immediately. It can be found at: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-148061.html . Add that initial list, and then read through the thread as forum owners are constantly updating the list. This step is imperative, no matter who you want to visit your site regarding other countries.

Next it's time to ban IP addresses, and this can be done in the same section as the E-mail domains. You can ban individual IP addresses as they come about, you can ban entire countries (like China, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation which are the worst offenders), or you can do both. Since my forum is regionalized, I do both, and it works like a charm.

If you want to block entire countries, because the sad truth is that the number of spammers far outweigh the number of legit users in some countries, go to http://blockacountry.com, select a country, and a code will pop up. Simply place this small code into an .htaccess file in your forum's root folder. No other code has to be in that file. If a user from the blocked country tries to access your site, he will be redirected to blockacountry.comcom's "sorry" page.

If you think blocking an entire country is prejudice or harsh...just wait. Onspammersers start signing up (a few will still try with Gmail hotmailail accounts each day), just check tip ip address at http://ip-lookup.net, and you'll soon see for yourself.

You can also add individual IP addresses one by one spammersers drop by so they don't return, or you can search vbulletin.com/forum for offending IP addresses. Some might argue that banning IP addresses is futile and there is some truth to this, as those in the know are able to mask their actual IP address. While that may be true in theory, after doing some research, I've learned that certaspammersers change E-mail addresses instead of their IP addresses, so banning individual IP addresses isn't a complete lost cause.

Once I implemented these steps on vBulletintin site, I became in total control of the situation. For instance, today I've received thrspammersers. I haven't bothered with the IP addresses, but their non-answer to my extra question gave them away. With this method, I can approve legit users as soon as I'm notified, and I can do a mass-denial spammersers once each evening, giving me more time to work on the site itself.