How to stop Chinese spam?

ctupramod

Hey!
Chinese spam thing is getting worse. I already installed several plugins related to stop this. And i'm using first post approve, Spam prevention, mark as a spammer plugin..etc.
It's really annoying to see more than 10-15 spam discussions every time i log in. And i must manually delete them one by one.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is it just for me ?

luceos

ctupramod there's a request to add auto-delete marked posts to the Spam Prevention extension. I haven't been able to dive into it yet though.

GreXXL

ctupramod have you also tried using StopForumSpam and/or Akismet?

Sibert

ctupramod Chinese spam thing is getting worse

Have you tried to block a country using Cloudflare CDN?

zgq354

Also annoying, I run a Chinese forum, from my experience it seems that the spam posts are all about the fake phone numbers website.

I am currently using recaptha, which can reduce the frequency to 1-5 per day. Then add a first post approval setting to prevent the spam post being exposed, then manually delete the post & ban the fake user.

Looking for a better solution too... 👀

poVoq

Yeah, super annoying. I switched to invite codes via fof-doorman as the spam really is too much when you can't bulk delete messages like in other forum software.

Wellwisher

poVoq so that's why I was asking this

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32606-any-extensions-that-ask-custom-anti-spam-bots-questions-set-by-admin

Prevention is better than the cure.

On simplemachines forum, admins could set custom anti-spam bot security questions and have a dafault capcha system.
I would only update the questions every 2-3 months and it worked. All these other anti-spam extensions are circumvented quickly.

The simplest method, tends to work best

For example, one of the questions I would ask a new user: What is the name of the author that publish article named "XYZ". A real person would need to go and check the site's article to find the answer.

Burial0268

Sibert This can only be a short-term defense, and they will use a new IP in a few months.

Take my own site as an example: I had blocked their IP (Bangladesh) using Cloudflare's regional access restrictions, but they seems to analyze the user base of your website, so a few months later they used a new IP (Mainland China and Hong Kong),this is the main audience of my website.

From this point of view, it seems that we need some better solutions rather than treating the symptoms rather than the root causes.

zgq354

Sibert I think the problem is not ip-related, directly blocking country would result in a lot of false blocks.

Sibert

Burial0268 This can only be a short-term defense, and they will use a new IP in a few months.

By blocking a country, you block a bunch of IP-addresses. The example just show a IP-address that have been blocked.
I guess that Cloudflare keeps this "country IP-range" updated.

cilia

doorman could be very effective on this

dexif

I can recommend the FoF filter. I also made a pull request with automatic removal of spam posts.
For now, you can just apply my changes to the installed filter extension.

vn0202

dexif thanks

Zeokat

I'm also searching for a proper anti-spam solution. I have daily posts with chinese spam and from other countries, so IP ban isn't a proper option.
Of course spam are non validated posts but... will be nice ban them before post.

Maybe someone can create an extensión which allow setup custom questions to solve on register.

dexif

Zeokat You can use FOF Filter with my changes. It works for me.

Zeokat

dexif Thanks but that isn't a solution to stop spam.

Finally i had to use doorman as a temporal solution.

dexif

Zeokat
I do not agree with you. I haven't had spam on the forum for 2 weeks now. Although earlier there were up to 30 messages per day. I just added some words and url from spam to the filter and nothing else comes through.