We need some sort of way to get rid of these spammers. I can already tell they are going to start plugging up the site.

 

anyone else think we need this? Personally I hate spammers.

 

As much as I hate spam...its kinda nice to come to the front page and there be a new post on this board. lol

 

As I can testify from being a moderator over at CT ... It's extremely difficult to deal with spammers that register onto forums. In effect, it forces you to monitor each and every new registrant.

 

maybe we should make it so people have to fill out a bunch of info suck as year, make, model of truck, plans for truck, persons age, city, state, hobbies, etc that way it takes longer than 5 seconds to create a profile and post. Also the first post should be posted in an introduction section. That would take care of a bunch of spammers who aren't willing to take the time for a lengthy registration. This has to be one of the easiest forums to post on because we're getting a lot for a new site.

 

You're right - making a longer registration process mandatory would help to deter the current generation of forum-spammers. It's up to Jeff, however, as to whether or not he wants to move in that direction.

Over at CT we've not (yet...) gone to that length - although we've recently added an email verification cycle (have to respond to email to complete registration) which has helped somewhat.

Even with additiona VBulletin anti-spam features and the additional registration step, we're still getting 1 to 2 new spammers every day or two.

Another note ... In recent weeks I've noticed that forum-spammers are getting more sophisticated - adding junk / random text to an increasing number of mandatory fields. This makes it easier to identify potential spammers based on their Profile contents, but this requires manual moderator review ...