Forum Getting trolled/spammed by abusive members w/ proxies
 

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Just wanted to let you know how bad the PM and visitor message problem is getting since you're probably not aware of the extent of it. At this point it's safe to say it's effecting your traffic numbers.

At first it was just HK posting offensive images and attacks on dozens (or maybe sometimes 100's) of user walls. There is no way to find these messages using search results b/c they do not tell us which walls are posted on, or link to the posts. So all we can do is wait for someone to report them.

Annoying, also potentially illegal since some of it was porn and it's still there, but not that big a deal.

Now we've got BM doing the same thing and also sending private messages to as many members as she can. She creates new accounts each day to do this. The messages are basically accusing IS of being some kind of huge mind control conpsiracy, the content isn't important, she's bat****, but I know if I had just joined a forum and I was getting weird messages and wall posts from crazy people I would probably just go somewhere else.

Most of it could be solved by greenguy's suggestion of disallowing wall posts and PM's by members until they had a reasonable amount of posts (and I would add, time) on the forum.

The thing that trips me out is that VB hasn't fixed this already. You could use the visitor message expoilt to post automated links on every VB forum on the net and there would be nothing most of them could do about it. It's a blackhat SEO dream come true.

This is one of the messages a member has sent me.

Is there anything we can do to limit this amount of spam? If we ban them they re-register on a proxy.