Are they signing up and posting the same url's over and over? if so censor the domain names. What are they exactly linking to? viagra websites? or proper websites/forums.

Because if they are just spamming crap like herbal viagra and cheap holidays then someone is just doing it to annoy you.

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Immortality will come to such as are fit for it

As Toucan said, try another mod or two...The one that he mentioned was the first that came to my mind as well. It is able to detect certain words in first posts....common spam words like viagra, motorola, cell phones, etc...If somebody makes a first post containing one of the "red flag" words, their post and/or account is automatically put into moderation.

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It's probably manually entered accounts, not bots, doing the sign ups. There's really nothing you can do about that. Try commenting out your homepage fields and other fields where these people enter those spam sites so at least when they register they can't enter their homepage on the signup.

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I don’t think this is that easy, the spammers that do make it to my forum are actually posting links to sites which are related to my niches. So I believe this is definitely targeted spamming and I know for sure that people are doing this and not bots. So it is kind of difficult to stop them with normal anti spam hacks, the only way to curtail this problem is to ensure there is a mod/admin online almost 24hours a day (which I try to do) and any person spamming is either immediately banned or their account is deleted and the threads are removed.

Heck I have even started banning the names of the sites that these spammers are posting, since most often than not it is the same sites doing it over and over again!

I guess people in webmaster niche are smart enough to understand that employing such underhanded tactics aren’t going to get them any where and that’s why we don’t see spam on AF.

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Exactly what i thought.

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Immortality will come to such as are fit for it

Thank you all for your advice, it's appreciated

The spammers posts links to other sites, viagra, holidays, mobile phones etc. Some are even webmasters promoting their own sites.

We had a few more yesterday but we are lucky to have staff online around 98% of the time so they are quickly removed. I ban their IPs but I'm not sure that will make much difference.

Thanks again for you help

I am not a big fan of banning ips unless it is of proxy or of a server, banning ips for normal isps can block future and present members as well and most often than not spammers have dynamic ips so they just have to restart their connection to gain a new one.

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Each ISP assigns a unique IP to each of its customers, so banning one IP wouldn't restrict access to anyone else that uses the same ISP.

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Immortality will come to such as are fit for it

Yeah, and one more thing to do to make sure you're not banning anyone else is to search the IP on your forum before you ban it to make sure no current member has the IP.

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It could if they assign that IP to someone else a couple weeks down the road. A lot of members are shown to have the same IP that are within the same area on my forum.

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