Weird Simple Machines Forums Spamming...

[KonstantinosM]

I was creating a forum for the Hellenic society of SPC, when I went to pass the motion someone amended it so the forum is not to be used, it hasn't been approved yet either. Still the forum (not ready) is up at http://www.hellenicsocietyofspc.org/index.php

There are 37 pages of spam by around 200 different usernames... Why did this happen? Should I do something before deleting all this spam or is anyone interested in 700 posts worth of spam?

Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing?

[rigel]

Google ranking algorithm favours sites with many links pointig to them.
So the spammer is using your forum to make his site looking prettier to the eyes of Google.
Just delete posts and users and introduce some restrictions if forum is not moderated yed.

[freethink2013]

delete and ban. best thing you can do is disable users being able to post links in their first few posts.

not sure if there's a simple machines add on but check out stopforumspam.com

[KonstantinosM]

Google ranking algorithm favours sites with many links pointig to them.
So the spammer is using your forum to make his site looking prettier to the eyes of Google.
Just delete posts and users and introduce some restrictions if forum is not moderated yed.

Thanks, I just hate having to ban so many users and delete so many posts. It'l take a while, I may even disable the forum till then...

I sincerely hope bitcoin puts a stop to this crazy google ad-money problem!
If content creators get paid in BTC donations I'm sure there will be less sites using ads.

[KonstantinosM]

I deleted all the posts but now I'm stuck with around 300 spammer profiles... If you know how to bulk delete all the users except for admin give me a reply!

Edit: I deleted the bulk of the users (98%) By going through (Admin>Maintenance>Members) and deleting all accounts that were inactive for 1 Day or hadn't confirmed their e-mail address for 1 Day (I also tried 0.001 Days, but I'm not sure it worked)  The rest I'll manually delete in seconds.

[hamdi]

use phpmyadmin and access the database directly

[freethink2013]

I deleted all the posts but now I'm stuck with around 300 spammer profiles... If you know how to bulk delete all the users except for admin give me a reply!

Edit: I deleted the bulk of the users (98%) By going through (Admin>Maintenance>Members) and deleting all accounts that were inactive for 1 Day or hadn't confirmed their e-mail address for 1 Day (I also tried 0.001 Days, but I'm not sure it worked)  The rest I'll manually delete in seconds.

don't allow people with unconfirmed emails to post

[oli123123]

Use reCAPTCHA.

[MoneyGod]

Use reCAPTCHA.

its a better idea using reCAPTCHA is good 

[KonstantinosM]

Use reCAPTCHA.

its a better idea using reCAPTCHA is good 

This and don't allow members to post without a confirmed email. This should work for starters.

I added a verification question. It reads: "Password:". The password is many characters long and a jumble... I'll re-delete all the spammers and wait to see what happens.
I changed the captcha settings to "extreme" Still it is really easy to read and I'm sure it is a very old and compromised captcha system.