I have a community portal where users have the ability to register w/o approval. I implemented Mollom almost a year ago and that has eliminated most of the comment / content spam. However - I've recently noticed an increase in account creation where spammers are filling their user profiles (additional profile fields for my users like bio / website / etc) with their spam links. I actually noticed this with some bizarre twitter spam that was linking to a user profile on my site... Not good - I want to get rid of this garbage.
To get a better idea of the problem I've created a view to show me a reverse sorted list of users and their profiles. You can see in the attachment there are quite a few in just the past couple hours. I have nearly 24K users right now and presumably quite a few of those have spam filled profiles.
Does anybody have a suggestion for ways I can block lots of users in bulk? Off the top of my head I'm thinking of using Views Bulk Operations on my view I created the screenshot with but I've never used VBO before... Thoughts?
Thanks,
Chris
| Attachment | Size |
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| spam-users-created.jpg | 238.36 KB |
Comments
Try Spambot
A little late for this, but it might stop the spammy registrants:
http://drupal.org/project/spambot
I don't have any experience with the module, but I do use the underlying API for a Simple Machines forum I run. Seems to work rather well, as long as I block by address and IP and not by username.
VBO
VBO is excellent and would be a good solution to removing the existing profiles. I have used it for many similar purposes.
You may also want to track/review the IPs used for signup and block known malicious hosts from new registrations, but that is only going to stop the bottom-of-the-barrel spammers.
Status update...
Thanks for the suggestions you guys!
I've installed VBO on my dev site and it works wonderfully! I can't believe I never used it before - I love how it can work on huge numbers of users/nodes/whatever. I use a points system on my site so I made a view that looks at all users in the past 2 years who enabled their user profile fields & yet have 0 points (which tells me they never did anything on the site and are likely spammers). I'll still have to comb through the list just to make sure I don't mass block valid users.
In all there are 3K bad profiles to go through. Nothing that can't be handled in an evening. Moving forward this tells me I need to find a way to stop user profile / signature spam as it's added so that it doesn't get to be such a huge problem.
Chris
Chris Grant
Senior Visualization Artist | HMC Architects
Portfolio | christophergrant.com
IE Drupal | g.d.o/inland-empire
I've posted details on the
I've posted details on the SEO spam problem & the solution I implemented on my personal site. If you run a community site like me you just might be surprised how many user profiles were filled with SEO spam - I know I was.
Read the article here: http://christophergrant.com/section/drupal-dev-journal/rooting-out-seo-s...
Chris Grant
Senior Visualization Artist | HMC Architects
Portfolio | christophergrant.com
IE Drupal | g.d.o/inland-empire