Merged How to protect my forum from spam

I am new to Kunena and just installed K1.63 My Joomla1.6 site is going to replace my existing site but I do not keep it "on line" yet. I had a BBB forum on my old site and it was taken over by spammers and I had to shut it down. I hope the Kunena site will be better. Is there a captcha program that will work on Joomla1.6? Also can I make every post go to my computer to authorize it before it goes on the forum? I know this is extra work, but we may not have that much activity anyway. Is there any other measures I can take. I see some plugins - but they are not for Joomla1.6

OOps - I guess this is the wrong spot - I'll try to find the right one

Where would I ask this question? I can not find any forum for Joomla1.6

Thank you Sozzled for the extensive reply. I very much appreciate you spending the time to give such a long and concise answer to my questions.

Maybe you could create a post of some of the tools you at Kunena use, besides live people in the forums. I have tried blocking IPs and entire countries from my website completely using .htaccess files. (and as stated, they must be registered, email confirmed until they can post). They keep coming back and use proxy servers, I assume. I have people that use the same tactics but the IPs come from China, Chicago, Germany, France, etc... (all over)

Once again, thank you so much for the time you took in your reply, very much appreciated!
(BTW - Kunena is the ONLY and BEST Joomla Forum in my opinion!) I have other sites running Kunena with no issues, this one site as Sozzled had said is just a more "high profile" site about paranormal stuff, so of course it is being hit up due to the popularity of that topic.

Thanks!

If this has been asked before, I can't find it.

I have a few "trouble" users that I would like to set as requiring approval for all of their posts. Most of my forums do not require moderator approval and I want to leave them open, I just want to control those few users who are constant trouble but who haven't quite reached banned status yet. This is a feature available in Yahoo groups that is SUPER helpful.

*** Topics merged ***

Yes, this question has been asked before (see msg #4 in this topic) and it's a good idea that has not yet been implemented in Kunena.

I often get spammers who deliberately join the forum just to advertise on our forum. We normally jump on them pretty quickly, ban them and remove the content.I want to put something along the lines of "attention spammers, your material will be removed quickly if you spam our forum" on the signup page.

They don't read it anyway, so why to bother?

1) please tell me how do i protect my forum from spam ?

2)i also want to prevent users from adding links to my forum like http://www.test1{.}com?

G'day, kr200, and welcome to Kunena.

The problem with spam has less to do with the Kunena forum software than it does with how you administer your website. Yes, there are ways that you can minimise the amount of spam that you might get on your forum but it depends on the lengths to which you are prepared to go to control it. Although there are features built into Kunena to help you control the amount of spam, how does one adequately answer the question "How do I protect my forum from spam?" One might as well ask the question "How long is a piece of string?" One could also ask the question "How do I stop people asking the same question over and over again?" There are no simple answers to these kinds of never-ending questions.

As I have just written, the problem with spam actually has very little to do with Kunena. It is for this reason that this discussion is "off-topic" to the main purpose of www.kunena.org which is about helping people install Kunena, maintain Kunena and to answer questions that specifically relate to Kunena. The problem with spam is that no forum software is totally immune. Some products make it easier than others to allow spam to get on people's websites and some products are a little better in this regard. I will leave it to others to comment on whether Kunena is better, worse, or on a par with other products.

Just because the problem is "off-topic" to Kunena does not mean that we should not discuss the issue in a calm, objective and reasonable way and I hope that we can continue to do that to help one another.

Certainly there are ways that we can improve Kunena to make it more difficult to let spam get onto your forum; however, for every technical improvement that is made to Kunena there will be someone who will get around the restrictions and then we're back where we started. As I have written on numerous occasions

The only effective remedy against spam is vigilance.

As a general guide to some of the things that you can do, I suggest you read my post (msg #186 in this topic) which might help you to understand the problem that we are all dealing with.

Some site genres are more likely to attract spam than others. Some sites are an open invitation to spam. Even if you put a signpost on the front page of your site that warns "If you spam you'll be banned", spammers don't give a damn. They'll do what they want to do regardless of whatever policy your site has. It's up to you to deal with it when it happens. Kunena has a number of good moderation tools that help people deal with the spam menace. This topic mentions those tools, if you have the patience to read what others have written.

In conclusion, there is no "silver bullet", guaranteed solution to the spam problem and that's just something people need to accept as a fact. I hope that what I have written will give you something to think about. The solution is in your capable hands.