Cleaning the forums of my educational website is something that is very tedious. How come? Well, I haven’t got a proper captcha installed. My forums run on phpBB. I don’t know if the latest version of phpBB (3.0) has got this feature automatically installed or not. Upgrading phpBB from version 2.x is not so straightforward.
That’s why I installed the SMF bulletin board system on another community website of mine. And I highly recommend it. PhpBB may be fine, but SMF is much more simpler to use. The upgrades are performed with one click! So, if you are just starting your own web-based community, use SMF! It is available as a one-click installation at most web hosts (phpBB is too).
Spam blacklist
So, because I have to manually weed out spam in my forums, I have compiled a nice list of domains from which most spammers and spambots arrive. Use this list to block out any possible spambots from your forums. Punch these addresses in your forum admin system, wherever it is that you block spammy domains. The zip archive below contains the spam blacklist (more than 700 domains) as a simple text file and as a Word document also, in case you might be needing it.
Blocking out the users/bots coming from these domains goes a long way to prevent your community forum from being spammed.
Forum spam statistics
Here is a nice graph that shows the provenance of spam.
As you can see, the majority of spambots/spammers come from generic top-level domains, like .com, .info, .org and .net.
The specific countries that most spam accounts originate from are, as you might expect, China and Russia. However, it is only recently that my bulletin board has been inundated with .cn spambots. Russian spam ruled supreme for years. The trend began to change last year, and the Chinese quickly caught up with their Russian counterparts.
Spam domains facts
Here is some interesting information about the spammer domains. The number between the parenthesis is how many times the word appears among the 700 domains on my spam blacklist.
- mail (71)
- best (22)
- search (18)
- free (13)
- pharm, shop (9)
- sex (8)
- adult (7)
- drug, buy, loan, super (6)
- movie, pill (5)
- nasty, mortgage, credit (4)
Copycat domains
These have the same name as the most famous domains, except for their extension (and a hefty amount of spam arrives from them):
- hotmail.org
- hotmail.net
- gmail.org
- gmail.net
- adsense1.info
The trashiest spam domain names
These are incredibly stupid, trashy and retarded.
- 16girlshogtied.com
- abovegroundpooldeckissues.com
- incesttrade.com
- abovegroundpoolfiltershoppers.com
- hotcreampie.info
- parishiltonvideos.ws
- topbestbank.info
- rusmafia.com
- thegreatestfarm.cn
- disadvantagesgovernment.cn
- grossapartments.cn
- cheap0available.info
Free web mail sites
The websites where you can open a free e-mail account are among the most spammy ones.There are less known ones, like web.de or mail.ru. But the problem is that a big number of spambots and spammers arrive from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. And you can’t block these, because normal, ordinary members of your community use them very often.
The solution is to have a captcha installed and also the option not to let forum members post any links before they have posted at least 10-20 posts.
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