One of the most frustrating jobs for any vBulletin forum admin or moderator is the never ending fight to stop post and PM spam. There are spambots that specifically target vBulletin forums. vBulletin has helped by adding Akismet spam protection, captcha protection, simple question and answer or reCaptcha to help combat post spam. This was effective until the vBulletin captcha was cracked. The Q&A, in my testing also doesn’t seem, to be effective. These are the measure I’ve taken to help combat the fight against spam.

To stop the post spam I use reCaptcha.  It seems to be the most effective against spambots, but, for the low life spammers that still do things manually even reCaptcha doesn’t help. The main purpose of these spammers is to get backlinks to their sites and services. What I did was create a new usergroup called Registered Members. The new group has the same privileges as the default Registered Users group.

Read on to see how to set up the registered users group and the new registered members group permissions to help combat vBulletin forum spam.

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