UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing Admin Zone Integrate - for Registration ( http://www.stopforumspam.com/ )

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

I use this site to "ban" email address that are of known spammers. Its very helpful, but then again, I have to manually delete, decline, and then add their email address to the Ban LIst.

Is there anything out there that has already incorporate the site so that its more automated, so I dont spend 3 hours to compare against their list just to update the settings in the forum?

I am not aware of any integration - however I am not sure it is required.

All I do is require all new members to validate their email address - if you use this in conjunction with CAPTCHA then the number of spammers signing up reduces to virtually zero as spammers generally have no access to their email that they sign up with.

After 24 hours their new account is deleted automatically if not verified.

Im looking for more automation, so that their email addresses are added to the ban list, prior to their "having come along to register" at our forum. I get 100-200 of these bounce emails a week because of spammers signing up with fake addresses. And 90% of those bounce email addresses are found on that website.

Its more of a proactive approach to known forum spammers, than a reactive one.

Something that should be looked into, imho; the owner of that site is always looking for input, so that his list can be made available to forum owners.

I have a big list of free email provider domain names that I ban.

If they are good spammers, wouldn't they just choose another email address?

They have an API, shouldn't be too much work to check IP/Email etc live against their list.

But somehow, we hardly ever (maybe once or twice in our existence) get any spammers. But then again, we kinda check names, and your profile has to be filled in with some sort of logic information.

I started work on an application to display an image based on status; it works, but I gave thought to it...

If you want to do a check, you really have to check 3 items (username, email, ip); so if you do a check on one user, you have to do 3 checks... So if you're looking through say the user list, that's 20 users per page, at 3 queries per user, that's 60 queries per page load... I think you'll end up being blocked from using their API for doing such things...

I registered on some forum today that had a neat thing... before even the register w/ CAPTCHA screen, you got presented with 4 images and were asked "which one is a teady bear" and you had to click on the image. I thought that was a terrific device. But alas, I still had to go thru the CAPTCHA anyway

I love the captcha system that was mentioned here that was actually used to scan books that machines couldn't scan.

You would be presented with 2 images, one of which they knew what was on it, and one the ocr software could not read. By using that captcha, you also helped OCR'ing books.

I do like that one yarpiekins ...