[salem]

Another day, another 10+ posts from one of the cloned credit card clots or the phake passport prats.

First of all, this is old -> Powered by: vBulletin Version 3.0.5
It's 8 years old FFS.
Are the spammers just getting in through well-known security holes that have long been fixed?

Second, more recent versions have a plugin which interfaces directly with http://stopforumspam.com/
Not only does it stop a lot of idiots at the door, those that do get through would find their details quickly forwarded to SFS (thus benefiting any communities which said spammer has yet to get to). This improves the whole forum ecosystem for the benefit of all forums.

Third, I see very little reason why newbies should have unlimited posting privileges when they have almost no privilege to do pretty much anything else. A fairly simple "n+2" posts per day (where n is the number of posts(*) already made) ought to suffice. That at least allows the genuine newbie to say hello and ask a question. On day 2, they get 4 posts and from then on, it doesn't really matter.

Drive-by twits would be clipped at two, and would be banned before ever getting a chance at day 2 (even if they bothered to come back).

(*) I first though about number of days of being a member, but I often see "sleeper" members who've been members for months with no posts, then they start spamming (but their posts per day average remains nice and low).

[Winters]

The forums are in the process of being updated as I type. It has been a long time coming but the new owners have put it in motion and we should be seeing some results soon.

With the modernization of the forums will also come more advanced anti-spam features.

[salem]

In the absence of anything more immediate like a forum update, could TPTB actively purge all the ccard and other fakery posts from the board?

Banning the twits doesn't help if the posts are still there on the board and in google searches to attract more of the twits.

[aitken325i]

Mods catch the posts when we can, but removing all the posts requires pruning by an admin unfortunately.

There are active discussions in the mod/admin area currently to see how we can combat this more effectively until the forums are updated.

[ishnid]

Originally Posted by aitken325i

Mods catch the posts when we can, but removing all the posts requires pruning by an admin unfortunately.

There are active discussions in the mod/admin area currently to see how we can combat this more effectively until the forums are updated.

To expand on this, any mod can ban a user, but only the mods in particular forums can delete the posts. So generally if I come across a spammer I'll ban the user, delete any posts in forums I mod and then report the other posts so (hopefully) some other mod will delete those ASAP.

[salem]

We are about to upgrade these communities to a much newer version of vBulletin

That was about 6 months ago.

[Winters]

The new owners are upgrading the various forums and communities one at a time. I believe DevShed is next.