Weeding Out SMF Spam Emails

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Weeding Out SMF Spam Emails

SMF Spam Emails

Truegho

12:17 am on Sep 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

I have a big problem with my SMF Forum, and hope somebody can help me out here.

My problem is that I don't know how to weed out suspect spam emails from my Pending Members list for my SMF Forum. I know that a lot of email addresses with the "gmail" suffix are usually spammers, but not always.

My Pending Members list has now grown to 327, most of which I'm sure are spam emails.

Is there a program I can download and use to instantly filter out all those dodgy emails so that I can then activate all the pending members without fear of erroneously letting in a spammer?

SteveWh

4:41 am on Sep 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

I don't see a "Pending Members" list in Admin. Is yours actually "Awaiting Activation"? (I use the email activation method - they have to click on an email link to activate their new account).

If someone hasn't completed their registration by activating within about a month, I delete them (without using the option to send them an email about it). Usually, anyone who really wants to join and participate activates within a couple of minutes.

I think there might be an SMF plugin that can check registration email addresses against known spammer lists.

SMF allows you to block registration from entire domains such as *@hotmail.com or *@gmail.com, but that's probably too drastic.

I have banned other domains, though. For example, there's a company that creates temporary email addresses only good for about 1 hour.

If your member list gets too unmanageable with hundreds of members who have never participated, you could delete anyone who still has 0 posts a year after activation, or who hasn't even visited the forum within a year of their registration day.

Truegho

12:56 pm on Sep 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hi. Thanks for your reply. Yes, you're right - the list I refer to is the "Awaiting Activation" one. It is very annoying that I cannot differentiate which are spam emails and which aren't. You see, the danger is, if I venture to activate ALL the members, there is danger that my forums will immediately be innundated with spam messages. This happened to me last time, when I just went ahead and activated them all indiscrimantely. This blunder necessitated my having to scrap the whole forum and start again from scratch.

You mentioned the possibility of a program available that might check spam mails. Will try to get that online, if I can.

Spam messages in forums are always a pain in the posterior!

SteveWh

2:31 pm on Sep 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

The SMF mod I had in mind (I haven't used it) is "Stop Forum Spam". Click on the "Spam Prevention" category at this page:
[custom.simplemachines.org...]
It's on page 2 of the list.

Before installing it, I'd suggest searching the SMF Community Forum for references to it, to see what people have said about it, if anything.