Hi everyone,

I have read the numerous posts complaining about the spammers from China and Adland Islands. Quite frankly I am as sick of them as you. Despite having done everything I can to try and stop them the buggers still manage to invade.

However I have come up with a solution that up to now appears to be working. I take the web address of the spammer and look up who owns the domain name and the hosting company at which the site is hosted. I then contact the hosting company explaining the problem Im having and tell them I am giving them the opportunity to resolve the problem. If they cannot come up0 with a solution it leaves me alternative to report the domain owner and the hosting company to the relevant authorities. 

So far GoDaddy and Blue Host have responded, saying the will contact the owner of the problem site and tell them to resolve the problem, otherwise their account will be suspended possibly closed.I shall continue to do this with every hosting company and ask that you do the same and hope you will all do the same. Together we can hopefully stop this ongoing problem 

Good Luck

Great initiative. Well done. I found that when I have a splash page, and my join is split into two, I get Zero spammers. I am not sure why and how it works but it does.

What do you mean your Join is split in two?

Probably means he has the join form split into two pages. 

 you can make your join form "continue" to another page to complete before you submit to join the site, as of now your form is all on one page, if you go to your Admin>Fields Builder>Profile Fields

you can select the second or third tab, "misc info" or "security image" and select "join page"

when members sign up they advance to a second page to complete the sign up process, bots cannot do this.

No offense but you will drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with this, there are a million spammers who are spamming for thousands of different sites. The sites pop up and are taken down day by day. The domain names are somewhat similar but they are all slightly different. The hosts take them down IF they are selling something illegal like fake purses and then they pop back up the next day under a new domain name.

If the site is selling something legal there isn't much the host can do. If they contact them all they have to say is they have no idea what they are talking about. Remember they are hiring these companies in Asia to spam for them for a reason, so it doesn't blow back on them if someone reports it.

You are much better off using one of the suggestions here like Newton's and just stop them from signing up.

No offense from me either, but what you are doing is quite silly and a huge waste of your time.

To fend off spammers, or most likely spambots you have to use other techniques.

If your target group doesn't come from countries where the spam is coming from, block those countries, either in dolphin, htaccess or better yet server side.

To fend off spambots change the standard join structure of Dolphin, e.g. as suggested, use capchas wherever you can, without annoying your regular users too much.

You can also consider preventing new users from posting, until the next day, for example using the promotion membership.

Anyways, there are ways to get down the spam on an open site, mailing godaddy is not one of them though.

Best,

Eric

Hi everyone,

No offence has been taken by any of the comments posted. I appreciate your reply s and the information given, I have put  Newtons solution into action........watch this space

Many thanks to all 

I have a dedicated server and the spammers brought my sites down completely. Their bot activities would fill up the log files and cause database issues.

I am going to try Presscon's split form idea.

Does anyone know of a stronger captcha system that can be integrated with Dolphin?

reCaptcha is in the market and will be included in Dolphin 8.

Smartalk...  This is for 7 days please see attached picture...

That is quite a few phone calls...

I switched to Cloudflare and it has crippled those spam bots...

My Google Pages started at 40,000 and as you can see it is now and

in a week has gone to 162,482 and Bing grows everyday...

They have a program called "Project Honey Pot" that recognizes the IPS and domains of all those tormenting spammers and if they have to pass an additional challenge page and if they get past that they then are only allowed to have access for 5 minutes...

I looked at the pages they are challenging and they are the prom dresses and the fake Rolex and bridal dresses and shoes and on and on and on and one IP has about 15 alias usually 1 of each of the above mentioned.  Also because there are nearly 61,000 threats in 7 days I can't set them all to block because I don't know how to yet but I will figure it out.  The extra challenge and the fact they can only have access for 5 minutes if they pass that challenge really makes it pointless for them to keep trying...If they do then I can block them... I find this to be an amazing service and it is free...   

Yes I have to agree, Cloudflare is great and everyone should sign up there.

Not only for the threat control but also for the CDN, which will speed up your site significantly.

The standard account is free and should be enough for most of you.

 When I remove any field from my join page that is also on my splash page  i get a database error

Contact the developer of you splash page. It may be that your splash page hard coded the fields into the page. Not how it should be done, but if that's what the developer did then it would explain the error.

I have split the join page into two as per Newton's instructions, however I am still getting the 'Spam' message which is preventing any new signup.

Is there any way of adding users manually via Admin panel? Is there a Mod for 7.1 which allows this? Or does anyone know a workaround using phpMyadmin?

I see from another post that you solved it. I do have a antispam in the market that is a bit better and more reliable then the filters built into dolphin.

Thank you guys for this, I will try this !!! hope it works...

this isnt my thing i found it and use it and not any spam bots or joining

How to Add An Anti-Spam Question to Your Dolphin 7 Join Form

- See more at: http://blog.arvixe.com/adding-an-anti-spam-question-to-your-dolphin-7-join-form/#sthash.kYLtEIZC.dpuf

http://blog.arvixe.com/adding-an-anti-spam-question-to-your-dolphin-7-join-form/