Quote:
Originally Posted by xenigo
Oh shat. That's interesting. If that's what they're using, it doesn't seem like it's working too fantastic...
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Usually people using tools like that are going after the low hanging fruit because its about quantity, not quality. You can set it to retry X times etc and then move on.
Also, you should set registrations to have to be approved by mods and whatever other spam features there are... then you won't have to worry about spam posts... just registrations.
Just because you slowed one guy down, doesn't mean others aren't going to follow
As was mentioned before, you should also search "vbulletin footprints" or whatever software you are using, edit the templates and remove as much as possible. Use robots.txt to block useless pages like registration pages or other pages and do what you can to hide it from search engines. If you do not want it in search engines at all, just use robots.txt to block google/yahoo/bing - thats how they are typically finding forums to begin with. I think you can use google webmaster tools and have it or some pages removed from search results. Basically, software is just searching for things like :
' "powered by vbulletin" condos '
to find lists of vbulletin forums for those keywords. So you can search "vbulletin footprints" and try to eliminate what you can from templates and block other pages from showing up. But if you don't need it in search results, it would be best to block it from being crawled.
if you can modify the php, simple things like "what animal is the middle pic" would stop them. Captchas aren't really effective because eventually you'll just run into people using services like deathbycaptcha etc and they won't be slowed down by them.