How are you dealing with spam?

Previously all ads were approved by an admin before being posted. It was way too time consuming. Now there is a captcha in place and all ads are auto approved. Human spam and fraud ads are now getting through.

Is there a happy medium?

What are you guys doing for spam? What other ways are there of dealing with this?

SpamAssassin is offered for email spam only.

I am looking for ideas to keep spammers & fraudsters from posting ads.

I have heard from some classifieds owners that these type of postings are a daily occurrence. It would be nice to keep it to a minimum without having to approve every ad.

Not sure why I don't show as a customer, I've clicked the link to associate the forum with my account a couple of times. I am running v4.1.10 Developer.

You won't really be able to keep con artists or fraudsters away from your site, but there are tips to identify them. For example in my case, when a user with an odd IP address creates an account and posts ads that seem like fraud. Just ban their accounts.

EnergyFreak, how often do you run into this? Do you pre-approve all ads?

This is the first time a fraudster hit this site, but a buyer got swindled out of thousands. Just trying to find as many ways as possible to avoid it in the future.

I run a few Joomla sites and have recently integrated Botscout into the registration process. It's simple and it works. In Joomla, installing it as a module is a simple case of upload and activate (you'll need an API key).

For 68C the Botscout code would need to be pasted in but their instructions are pretty good. Would be nice if this was available as a 68C module though

From the Botscout site;

BotScout.com: Sample Code


The files are attached if anyone fancies a crack at this.

I get at least about 1 or 2 a day nothing big, no I do not approve all ads manually, but I check the web site every so often, so I catch them early enough.