We used to suffer from the spam at Oman3D like many other people who run a forum as part of their website. The basic vBulletin verification methods simply do not work any more and we were getting a crazy amount of spam that led many to use manual moderation of members and threads.
We recently upgraded our forum script to the latest version of vBulletin which uses
reCaptcha to stop spambots and guess what…. IT WORKS!
If you run vBulletin on your website and your bugged down to death by spam then you should do the following:
- Download the latest version of vBulletin and upgrade. If you have version 3.7.0 or higher then you can skip this stage.
- Register at reCaptcha and get a public and a private key from there.
- Go to your vBulletin Admin Panel, go under vBulletin Options and open the new Human Verification Manager. Select ‘reCaptcha’ as the image verification type and submit your public and private keys.
All newly registered users will be required to verify the reCaptcha images when registering. The new vBulletin also has a feature to ‘Delete a Post as Spam’ which lets you automatically delete all posts and threads by the same user with one click and also ban the user from the same window.Â
Although reCaptcha will stop all spambots, there are still some human spammers who will register like any other member and then spam you using a bot. There is nothing that you can ever do to stop these, but they are rare. (We get about one or two of these each week) Using the new in-line spam deletion tools will make get ride of them dead easy.
