• Support

  • Well I feel official, I got my first spam post on my flarum...

I feel like i made the big leagues today as an admin for a forum, I became big enough for someone to post a spam post. It was another language and I had no idea what it was for but i deleted it and suspended the user.

Now I need opinions, should I delete their entire account or just suspend? Any benefits of doing one vs the other?

    MikeJones On my own personal site I would definitely suspend and delete their entire account. What we do here on Flarum is mark the user as a spammer which permanently bans that account.

    I would also take note of the IP in case it becomes a common occurrence. You can block that IP from accessing your site in the future.

    Congrats on the forum as well. It's coming along. I do visit every now and then and you've definitely got a niche that is sure to get popular as time passes. 😉

        Prosperous ok yea I marked him as spam with the flarum tools and I deleted his post. SO I can go delete his account now?

        Where can I make note of his IP and how would I ban a specific IP?

        Also why is suspend an option shouldn't we all just delete?

            MikeJones Perfect. You can if you like. It's not a necessity as they cannot access the account to make further spam posts regardless. What they can do is make a new account though.

            As an admin you should have access to their IP address... You can add the Ban IPs by FriendsOfFlarum extension to assist with this should things get out of hand.

            Some people just don't like deleting accounts from their forums. I doubt there would be any other reason apart from personal preference.

              Congrats on the promotion 😉

              Please take a look at the default extensions on this forum. It has a couple of anti-spam plugins. Normally, human bots are beaten only through an IP ban. CAPTCHA can block most of the bots. I am never a fan of deleting accounts. Consider it a log and move the spam posts to an admin-only tag. Then an indefinite ban on the user can be helpful. If they have any attachments, even images, it is better to remove them.

              MikeJones did it look Vietnamese or something like that? I had something similar being posted on my forum just a few hours ago... (in the middle of the night here)

              It's something that happens seldom to me anyway, I haven't added any particular counter-measures though (like the captcha), because they would probably be only annoying for the rest of the users.

                  If you delete a user account, they will be able to create a new account with the same email and/or username. If you suspend them, then that email and username won't be available for new users.

                  This might not make a difference if the spammer use a different email every time, but it's probably worth keeping in mind.

                    MikeJones click on the date in a post and it should be right next to the timestamp 🙂

                    Edit: The "View post IP addresses" permission must also be assigned to the groups you want to be able to view IP's for in posts. You can find that permission under "Moderation" in the Permissions tab in the Admin CP.

                        how popular is your flarum? I use to had vanilla but it was vunerable and spam infested when it wasn't even advertised. everything good so far.

                          userb I am getting a decent amount of traffic right now and users are starting to pick up but I really am not that big yet.

                          Just got another similar spam post today 😞

                              MikeJones Can you send me the details of that spam post (what made it stand out)? We handle quite some ourselves here on discuss, I prevent (auto-block) specific types of spam already by using a local extender which I could push into a repository with some configuration options.

                                  luceos user name both times started with thanh....

                                  Text looked Vietnamese or something. I have deleted both posts already but if I get a third one I will take some screen shots and gather more details

                                      MikeJones I've had several users with usernames like that register on one of my forums, didn't post anything but the emails seems super suspicious to me when I checked outgoing email history on my mail server. Something interesting to note is that they never verified their accounts. The only thing I can think of is that the Custom HTML email prevented them from registering.

                                        I kid you not for the past 2 days I've been having Flarum/programming related dreams.

                                        Last night, I dreamt that there was a flood of spambots that invaded Discuss and they kept replicating each time we kept banishing them. It's just one of those mysteries that come part of the Internet that we still don't know how they manage to bypass these anti-spambot systems we put in place or if they are just really humans doing the manual hustling 🤣