I see a lot of people asking how to help prevent spam on their vBulletin forums. I'd like to offer things that I have found useful in helping prevent spam from appearing on the forums that I run.

Things to do

• Turn on Image Verification on Registration - vBulletin 3.6 makes using the image verification easier by allowing guests to click to get a new image if they can't read the current one. On top of that I have found that using Imagemagick helps create a much cleaner image so that it is easier to understand the letters. I recommend going to vBulletin Options > Image Settings and checking the following:
  • Image Verification Library: Imagemagick 6
  • Image Verification Options: Random Font and Random Color
  You can view our Register Page to see how clean and easy it is to read.

• Install this hack to Prevent Spam from appearing on your forums. What this hack does is if the user has less than x posts (number of posts defined by you) and their post has any of the keywords (also defined by you) in their post or in a url, such as ipod, free, buy etc etc, then that post will be sent to a moderation queue for your approval. This catches 99% of the spam and allows you to remove it without it touching your forum. I have mine set to check for 3 or less posts.

• Ban emails that are clearly used for spamming such as .ru and .de domains. I have not had one member sign up with those domain extensions and not end up being a spammer. You can help yourself by checking out the email addresses that spammers seem to be using and start banning them when it become obvious that no one legitimate is signing up with those addresses.

After you do all this you should be drastically cutting down on the amount of time you have to spend watching out for new spam posts on your forum. The hack mentioned above throws all the spam related posts in one moderation area for you to easily view at your convenience. This should save you lots of time in the long run. Nothing is better than a well alert staff however.