• Anything ‘published’ on the web is viewed as intellectual property and, regardless of whether it displays a copyright symbol or not, is therefore copyrighted by the originator. The only exception to this is if there is a “free and unrestricted reuse” statement associated with the work.

    In order to protect our members and TFL from possible litigation, all members must abide by the following new rules:

    1. Copying and pasting entire articles from another site to TFL is strictly prohibited. The same applies to articles from print or other media, and to posting photographs taken of copyrighted pages or other media.

    2. Copyright law provides for “fair use” of portions of a copyrighted work. You can copy no more than a SINGLE paragraph from the article to your post (3 or 4 sentences at most).

    3. You must provide a link to the article along with the name of website. For example: ww.xxx.yyy/zzz (The Lower Thumbsuck Daily News).

    4. You must provide, in your own words, a brief summary of the article AND your reasons for believing it will be of interest to TFL members. Failure to do so may result in the thread being closed or your post being deleted as a “cut and paste drive by.”

    5. Photographs and other images are also copyrighted. "Hotlinking" of images (so that it appears in your message) from other sites is also prohibited unless you own rights to the image. If you wish to share an image, provide a clickable link to it.

    Posts that do not follow these new guidelines will be altered or deleted by staff. Members who continue to violate this policy may lose their posting privileges at TFL.

    Thank you for your cooperation and your participation in TFL, the leading online forum for firearms enthusiasts.

vBulletin® and spammers

Just out of curiosity, how would any update to vbulletin prevent someone who registers with a legitimate name and email address from posting spam?
 
I hate to admit it, but we were finding that actual people and not bots were the ones signing up on our forums, somewhat like "gold farmers" but instead they just sign up for posting adds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_(gaming)

You can also spoof a legitimate email address, and a lot of the CAPTCHA can be bypassed by bots now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

vBulletin is now up to version 3.6.8

Also, bots tend to use the birthdate of March 28, 1983.


Couple of things that help:

Ask new registrants a question, something simple like "how much is two plus two". This can mess up some bots.

A lookup of common spam terms like NOKIA and automatically moderate any new postings that contain those terms.

There are examples of this that can be downloaded from vBulletin.org.
 
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