Is there an easy way to block robot subscriber spam?

[RonFred]

Anyone know of a simple anti-robot method - like a simple math question that a user must answer, or block all users who select some country that I plan to never support in my business anyway?

Several new subscriptions are being registered to my phplist. They are clearly nonsense entries with emails that don't work and incorrect titles and names - but not so obvious to trigger the spam catcher built into the config.php file. I just upgraded to phplist 2.10.17, and this robots started hitting my site.

I looked at the CAPTCHA hack but it looks very tedious to implement, and more frustration to my valid users who will have to read those goofy images.

So far no harm done, but it does add to my in box for new but unconfirmed subscribers every day.

[Speetmail]

if you have access to the server (linux) use fail2ban and block the bots.
more info see and use http://www.blocklist.de
i have have it on all my servers. it remove bots,spammers. hackers, scripts kids. and so on

[RonFred]

Thanks speetmail

I looked through my user history for the spam email IP addresses. They are all different / unique. So I do see the value of contributing these IP addresses back to a repository as you suggest, but I don't think it will stop my attackers.

I did wade through the hack notes to install google reCaptcha, which has stopped my spammers. But I really don't like the difficulty it puts on my new subscribers with it's long and hard to read challenge words.

[Speetmail]

fail2ban system is auto
it look in the apache log. all bot´s have a pattern

but reCaptcha can do the job.

here the last week have my system block 172 bots.
but the good part is . if you use doble signup. a bot can not do a doble signup.
and all not confimed emails you just delete. after 2 weeks. simple

[RonFred]

Blocking bots is a good thing - I will continue to look for some free time to support this fail2ban project. Thanks for the update on this Speetmail.

Yet in my case, I am afraid of bots trying to use my phplist double signup as a way to send annoying email to people I do not know. For example, the spammer I recently blocked with reCaptcha, looked as if he was sending legitimate looking email with ads for cars in in my registration's name and title fields. Sure, I delete them a few weeks later as these emails are either bogus or sent to people who have no interest in my email newsletter and announcements. But in the meantime, I was concerned that I was indirectly spamming people through the first part of my double signup process built into phplist. No way to confirm that was happening, but I didn't want to be flagged as an indirect spammer as a result of the real spammer tapping into my sendmail systems via phplist's request to confirm a new user.

Best regards,

Ron

[Speetmail]

after whe have speak about bots/ spammers. problem
a small plugin there use blocklist.de and 10 honypots sites .

put in you cronjob

01 6,12,18,23 * * * * /usr/bin/wget http://silverarm.dk/block.txt -O /var/www/.htaccess

i just make a .htaccess file where is block all bad bots.
where /var/www/.htaccess is where you webfolder is.

it will do the job.

NB: rember to : run command . a2enmod rewrite
and restart apache