Antispam/bot extension request/question

AndyZ

Hey guys 🙂 We are currently experiencing a spam bot attack on our Pixel Federation Forum, where bots are spamming coupons for temu 🙄 Does anyone know of an extension or another solution that could help us prevent this from happening? Our programmer came up with an idea for an extension "Auto Moderator", which would enable us to approve forum comments before they´re actually posted on the forum, however, this is not entirely doable for us due to capacity reasons of our agents and moderators 🙂
We would be grateful for all and any ideas 🤞 Thank you! 🙏

luceos

AndyZ you could add some custom throttling or blocking based on keywords, ip ranges or countries. Your programmer might take inspiration from this repo: luceos/flarum-extender-examplesblob/master/extend.php

Alternatively you could use cloudflare to set it to identify POST requests to the api as needing throttling.

KBExit

I'm surprised they are making it past the standard throttling in Flarum where it says to slow down.
I know theres an extension here that forces logins via email verification instead of password. Maybe that can completely rule it out? I doubt these bots check their emails.
Another thing, in permissions, you can make the first posts go through an approval requirement. If not already in the core, it's an extension.

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/22606-passwordless-login
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/25055-first-post-approval

If you can get the IP's, you may be able to block that too with:
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/20949-friendsofflarum-ban-ips

Do you have CloudFlare set up? They are pretty great at blocking bad actors too.

Also for registration:
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/18399-friendsofflarum-recaptcha

AndyZ

KBExit luceos Thank you guys 🙏 will forward the information to our progz 🤞 🙇

bunvisinhcom

Wonderful! Good Idea.