Suggestions needed for dealing with spammers please!

My new little site for dieters at http://dietharbor.com has very few members, but several spam abusers have found their way to the site already.

What are the best ways of dealing with these folks?

I tried banning them, but their activity and even blog posts still remain in the dashboard for everybody to see. I then tried deleting one, but that didn't help either?

I am using email validation already for new registrants. And captch.

Are there extra tools available to help deal with these people, including:

  • Automatically removing all posts of these people.
  • Preventing their activity from appearing in the dashboard/river (the activity listing itself is often spam).
  • Other?
Thanks,
doug
  • Wouldn't be from the following domain would it?

    http://mlgrise.com/

    Might be advisable not to visit - it is an elgg site, but the content is neither appropriate or useful.

     

  • Well, the spammers have been getting so bad that I turned on the "by invitation only" in Site Access. I tested it and it works fine.

    I take heart from the fact that the largest social network here in Japan, Mixi, is by invitation only and has well over 10 million members now.

    If anybody wants an invitation to join http://dietharbor.com, just send a request to support(at)dietharbor.com!

    Thanks,

    doug

  • hey Doug

    to screen your users, run their registration email through the "stop forum spam" db at:

    http://www.stopforumspam.com/search

    If it pops, do yourself a favor and delete their account.

    I hope that helps.

  • Thanks for the suggestion, Studio. For now I'm just running it as invitation only and letting groups know where to email for an invitation. But I'll keep that in mind for the future.

     

    doug

     

  • any plugins for anti spam for 1.6 yet? This is getting ridiculous...

  • Hmm.. wonder what's missing ? As I posted on some other threads (try elggalaxy..) We have had spam problems (on our ~68K user-base elgg-site), but... they are usually tracked down and made harmless within a couple of hours or within 12 hours. PlugIns cannot quite help if a spammer posts graphics which are spam because how can one ocr images and determine it is spam ? When we get graphic spam - we just go into the data folder and replace the offending image. If their Display Name is offensive.. just change it to something harmless, eg "InActive", and so on.. In extreme cases we ban their IP# !! gone forever.