# How does TPU avoid spammers? Asking for advice.



## Space Lynx (Nov 28, 2019)

So I am a part of this website called tarvalon dot net, it is a Wheel of Time book series fan club.  We always get these spammers advertising keto, or some wonder drug, or "male enhancement" stuff (note the picture below and advert website).  It's really annoying spam. I am trying to help out their moderator/staff come up with ideas on how to avoid this spam... any advice is welcome. My advice was to limit new accounts not be allowed to create a new topic until after 5 posts have been made, but the argument against that is well they just spam 5 random posts, which yeah makes sense. I don't think they have the technical know how of someone like W1zz, but any advice at all would be welcome.  
 I never see this kind of stuff on TPU, so it would be nice to know how to stop it, they really flood our community for many years now.

Cheers.


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## dorsetknob (Nov 28, 2019)

one thing is to have ACTIVE MEMBERS reporting Spam to the admin/Moderators for blocking/removable
and for said mods to act reasonably quickly
Also i believe @W1zzard has some forum plug in's that deal with this issue
Please Pm @W1zzard  for possible further Details


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## Splinterdog (Nov 28, 2019)

XenForo and WordPress have a wide selection of plugins for this problem, including the limiting of embedded links.
I use WoltLab, which doesn't have so many plugins for this, but in the backend  you can have admin approve membership manually, add IP addresses to a blacklist (very useful) and, as you have already tried, limit their posting rights.
Our spam problem has dropped off considerably since I took these measures.


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## W1zzard (Nov 28, 2019)

I wrote my own addon to fight the spammers, an early version is at xenforo: tpu detect spammers 

For xf 2.0 I've refined it, for use on tpu only, not sharing it anymore. I think xon at xf is working on a similar project


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## Tatty_One (Nov 28, 2019)

Within XenForo you can use the plugins available but if you want something more specific then I believe @W1zzard writes scripts for some of the anti spam measures, for example if you are getting a lot of meds/drugs spam lets just say as an example from a Region in Asia I think he can work some magic so new users posts from that region have to go into a Moderation queue where a posting threshold can be included so their first 5...…. 10 etc have to be approved by Mods before they are visible to the wider community, I am sure there are other scripts employed also. I am no expert but the magic W1z has worked since we moved over to XenForo about 6 years ago has reduced spam by some 90%, although there are always the odd few that still get through but small fry when you think just how many spammers are out there.


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## Space Lynx (Nov 28, 2019)

Fair enough, I was mainly curious as to why I see spammers on other sites and not here.  ^^

W1zz you should contact M$ and see if they will buy that script off you for like $30 million, then you can just chill rest of your life. lol  Pretty sure it would be profitable.


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## R-T-B (Nov 28, 2019)

lynx29 said:


> Fair enough, I was mainly curious as to why I see spammers on other sites and not here.  ^^
> 
> W1zz you should contact M$ and see if they will buy that script off you for like $30 million, then you can just chill rest of your life. lol  Pretty sure it would be profitable.



But why do that?  We all know he's in it for the Frog God.  Wealth is fleeting.


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