The top 4 discussions on General are spam
Thanks Jack, nuked them. It is a constant battle, even with an array of anti-spam tools. Are you interested in becoming an admin so you can ban such users and delete their content?
Admin, if you feel it would help the community, I’d love to. I really do understand the struggles these days to prevent spam, especially with the rise of spam bots.
By the way, just to let you know, I’ve noticed a large influx of new users in the past week. Most of these are valid users however some appear to be spammers.
Jack, yes, seems like Gibbon is growing, and this is bringing more users to the forum. It is great to see people such as yourself helping out those newer to the community : )
I’ve upgraded your account to moderator: if you see spam, can you click on the name of the submitting user, and then select to ban then and delete all their content? Let me know if you get stuck, or the new permissions don’t give you enough access.
Okay, thanks Ross. I’ll keep checking up on the forum and I’ll let you know if there are any issues.
The spam queue is full of users. It’s awful 
Yeah, I delete those that make it onto the site ASAP, but rarely look at the spam queue, other than to reassure myself that most of the junk is getting caught! Feel free to bulk delete from the spam queue. Ross.
@admin is there any way to select spam users based on content posted? For example, keywords trigger filters to block and delete content?
Sadly not on keywords, only on IP addresses and domain names, both of which I’ve found to be either ineffective or too broad. I see you’ve been killing a lot of spam today! Ross
Yeah, they all are to do with health and nutrition, I was just wondering whether we could remove them. Spam seems to have rocketed on the forum recently.
I think the change is that @ross is away, and she usually mops them all up before any of us notice they were already there!
Yes, that could be it. I’m trying my best to check about 4 times a day and to flush them out.
Hello 
Yep, keyword filtering would be a really nice option to have so I took a stab at creating a Vanilla Forums plugin for us. It uses a really simple filter that looks at the title of a discussion and marks it as spam if it starts with a URL (it doesn’t delete anything or block users, just helps filter spam away from the forums themselves). It also marks new discussions as spam if the user already has two or more items in the spam queue.
Hopefully this helps cut down a bit on the obvious spam (which seem to be mostly URLs), and we can always adjust the filtering as needed. Tested on a localhost install, feel free to checkout the plugin code it’s fairly straight-forward.
@ross you are an open source legend! When the plugin is proven you should definitely share it to the Vanilla community.
I’ve installed and enabled the plugin, and can’t find any settings. Do we now just sit back and watch spam recede into the distant past? Hope so ; )
Ross
@admin Update on Spam Filter: The system seems to be working and I personally haven’t had to clear anything since. They appeared in spam queue and I deleted all records there.
Jack, this is true indeed…but also no new posts coming through. Do you want to create a new account and test the new post and comment work flow as a member of the public, rather than as an admin? Thanks : )
@admin Will do. Thanks!
@admin After checking with another account (later deleted), it seems posts run through okay. It did not require any action and was posted fine. After this, I tried linking to a URL in the bar. It referred my post to the spam queue where it could be approved. Everything is working well!