Dealing with Spammers from outside the UK
 

Recently we had a spammer from Russia that must have come in during the night time, when most of our moderators are safetly tucked up in bed.

The board I am a moderator on is based in the US and has moderators all around the globe, that way we have a "Follow the Sun" policy to avoid spammers nipping in like that one did.

Am not sure of our global reach on TIBB, but when more moderators are appointed, maybe if we have some over seas posters, we could have this "Follow the Sun" approach.

Another thing we do over there is that any newbie who has less than a certain number of posts, who tries to post any links, has their post put in a moderation queue visible only to moderators and administrators. One of my jobs over there is to pick these posts up and decide if it is legitimate and therefore approved, or a spammer, leading to the deletion of the post, issuing a permaban and reporting the IP address.

If the software is not already set, maybe it can be setup to work the sameway to catch the spammers. As this is Vbulletin and the other board is Vbulletin it should be easy to do.

Rory lives in the US (ET) and is online most early hours.

Ange7 lives in Australia and could become a mod..

Plus we don't want the forum to become too strict.

A forum I'm on has a system in place whereby posters under 10 posts can't post links or PM people.

We do have anti-spam measures - including blocking users from some countries from posting straight-away - that stop most of the spammers.

If it wasn't for these measures there would be over 100 new spam accounts a day. :shocked:

LOL awww James! What if someone genuine comes on this forum from erm.... Nigeria? (Only chose that cos that's where I get all the scam emails from!!)>

Genuine regs can (in theory) be approved later. (at the moment it would be difficult to tell the difference :s)

Though Nigeria isn't currently on the banned list... so if anyone starts claiming that they've a large inheritance waiting to be collected or something ... don't respond. :D

What you mean that's not genuine?!.... brb

Seems we have a new breed of advertising in sigs. Check out the member eventcrasher. A new one to do it.

Madam i am 100% genuine just give me your bank details and Mafunde will transfer your winnings over straight away guaranteed

Idea ... what if you set it so you can only post in most forums if you have at least 1 post? That means you HAVE to introduce yourself or something before you post, and any spam posts will most likely go in there and easier to clear up as well as not clogging the forum up because noone goes in there anyway. Or for convenience in that forum a "make your first post" thread where people just come in and write hi or whatever.