Is it possible to stop spammers (I mean reduce it). I've got a fairly new forum, and it's become the target of one idiot posting the same message over and over. I delete the user and he re-registers.

Any tips?

Cheers.

Try banning his IP address, although if this is a pro spammer they will get around that as well.

You might try putting this user on everyone's ignore list, that way nobody will see his posts.

Try this hack out,
Prevent Spam Posts - vBulletin.org Forum

Do you make them confirm their email for each new registration? You may turn that on for awhile and he will have to create a new email address each time which he will get tired of doing.

The confirm registration by email was turned off... That's on now. If I ban an IP, if that's an ISP's IP am I likely to be banning many other potential users?

If you just ban his ip it won't ban anyone elses.

One of my forums was being targeted daily by spammers for maybe 2 months up until a few weeks ago. The spammers finally appear to have abandoned their efforts on that site.

I've always used email activation as well as image validation, but what seems to have worked best for me was being consistently active in moderating the site. Anytime a new spam thread appeared I would ban the account immediately & remove the spam. Do that consistently and my guess is that the spammers will eventually move on to easier targets.

Spam posts didn't initially start being a problem until I had not been active on that particular site for a few weeks...

Unless it's an AOL or similar host, who uses proxies that are used over and over by many different users. I have a number of members using AOL and they all come up with the same list of IPs. This is not just isolated to AOL either. IP cloaking sites will do the same and you may very well ban the good with the bad at some time. However, IP banning is one of the most effective measures and I do it too.

Jim

Where do you ban the individual IP?

Cheers.

Look in the vBulletin Options under Banning Options. You can also use your .htaccess file, if you have one, to ban IPs from your server, not just your forums.

Jim