Spam attack. Need help

Question

Facing spam attack on my q2a site. More than 60 answers in short time. Those answer are not relevent to the questions and containg meanless text with lot of web sites links. Answered as a anonymous. I have set moderation for anonymous posts. Lot of answers are waiting for moderation. Continouesly answers are adding for moderation. Please tell me how to prevent this.

And someone has added lot of tags to my member's question. I contacted the member and she did not know about this. How could this happen? I had set maximum number of tags 5. But he could add many number of tags to the question.

 

Comments

Wow! It is scary.

Very first thing just turn on moderation everywhere. On every action. It is frustrating but at lest prevent for further spamming.

Most of the spammers I found is from @webmail.com or so. It is strange or may be they found something in source and they are tracking Q2A site with it.

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Thanks, I set moderation and other spam protection measures. After someone added those tags, question indicated that "retagged x hours ago" without "by xxxx".

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Regarding the "anonymously" multi tagged question, can you confirm you are running a clean core (clean = without core hacks)? Also, what plugins are you using?

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I an using Google Analytics, Event Logger, Example Page, Facebook Lodin, Hastager, Badges, Best User per Month, Chat Room, Print, Share v 1.2, Tag Cloud, WYSIWYG Editor and XML site Map Plugins and did not do any changes in Core.

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Answer 1

There are a few settings you should enable. If you allow anonymous posting you should add CAPTCHAs to prevent automated spam. You should also limit the number of posts that can be made per IP per hour.

Comments

Thank you. I set the posting limit for IP.

Answer 2

Regarding the multiple hash issue, it seems to be a bug in the Hashtagger plugin. Each time you add a #hash it adds the corresponding tag to the question, regardless of any limit. So if the question has 20 words that start with a # then you will have 20 additional tags added to the question.

Comments

Thank You very much. So what is the solution for this?

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1. Decide what the appropriate behavior should be (EG: Should those "hashed words" be added as tags to the question or not? If so, should they respect the maximum tag amount? If that is the case, when the amount of tags exceed the maximum amount of tags set, then which ones should they be added to the question?)

2. Implement previous requirement

3. Test previous implementation

4. Publish plugin :)

Meanwhile, if possible, I'd try disabling adding tags in questions.

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Thank you again for your great support. Undrestood.