How do I keep away the spammers?

Question

I am getting hundreds of spammers hitting my site and I haven’t even advertised to get normal customers yet. All my time is spent blocking and getting rid of the users and posts. I cleared the list yesterday and today I’m over 60 spammers on the site trying to post. I have disabled my site to try to ask for answers on how I can get rid of these spam posts? I have captcha enabled so these are people coming to my site before I’ve even had an opening and going through the registration process but they’re all from the same mail.ru and gambling and fake viagra sites trying to push their crap into my site for a small non-profit? How are they finding this site? Luckily regular customers can’t see it because everything is moderated but I’m still getting inundated by these spammers trying to post. Please help?? I like the idea of this service but if I can’t get this under control it’s going the way of the dodo, and soon.

Comments

I went ahead and registered for the site. I have added the plug-in that you listed, but there is still a problem that I have ran into here. I have noticed that the program is still letting people sign up for the qtoa section even though their IP addresses are part of the "banned" section. I have clicked on several of the email addresses in question's IP addresses and they are coming up listed as "Matches banned IP address:" and the IP address is listed. Somehow they are still adding their addresses and its not catching that they have been added to the banned section. I will try the "registration-blocker" as well as the Akismet blocker and see if that will pare the spam down. If not, I am going to delete this program and see if I can find something else that is more able to work with spam filtering.

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Installing those plugins won't protect you instantly. You should blacklist spammy domains, or whitelist healthy domains when the spammers register.

In some SEO blogs, Q&A sites are even encouraged to be spammed to get backlinks.

Removing or changing the phrase "Powered by Question2..." also helps reduce the chance that your site is found by spammers. I have an unpublished Q2A site, and one day I tested Google CSE feature and Google indexed my site without my consent, and it invited spammers when they searched with the keywords "Powered by..."

IP banning may not work efficiently. In countries where spammers are notorious, they often use dynamic IPs, which change every time they reset their internet modem. Or there are some VPN tools to assist them to bypass this.

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P/S: They may also find you with other keywords like "To see more, click for the full list of questions or popular tags. "... Have fun!

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Akismet (from what I understood) is putting posts under moderation that the service detects as "spammy." Since you already seem to have moderation enabled for all posts (or at least for new accounts), but want to prevent spam from being posted in the first place, that plugin probably isn't going to help you much.

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If you want to, you can easily block countries using a proxy service on your domain like Cloudflare or Imperva.

Answer 1

There are several anti-spam plugins, including the one I forked recently (registration-blocker).

Comments

I added this plugin and it seems to work on the offending domains. I went from having 50-60 spammers per day to none. I was getting most of the traffic from just a handful of offending domains which I added to the blacklist and it seems to have done it’s job. Thanks!!

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You're welcome.

Answer 2

I updated the registration-blocker plugin. Now you can allow some email domains only (e.g. gmail.com, yahoo.com, ...)

Download: Updated Version