It is only a few months since my latest community and the spammers are already more active then the members on the site.

How do you deal with this? And what do you do with 100 or more users in the usergroup 'waiting email validation' or whatever?

It is only a few months since my latest community and the spammers are already more active then the members on the site.

How do you deal with this? And what do you do with 100 or more users in the usergroup 'waiting email validation' or whatever? Spammers as in human spammers or those annoying "online poker" spam bots? With human spammers I use "tachy goes to Coventry" I lurveeeee that feature, works a treat with the majority of spammers. Banning is useless so in extreme cases, I just use the Miserable users hack - they don't realise they've been banned and they eventually give up and leave. I have several hundred users "waiting email validation"! I don't think there's much you can do other than put up a notice/extra page on your site to explain to people how to put your url on their email safe lists. You can't offer them email support as your emails will probably end up in their junk mail as well and when we tried live chat and ticket support it was more trouble than it's worth. I gave up on that usergroup a long time ago, but if anyone has any neat solutions, I'll certainly give them a try. :)

Once every 3 months I go check the users waiting validation group and email them their codes again and invite them to post. The emails that bounce are matched against the userbase and those users are deleted. The rest is given a grace period of some months.

And once every 6 months I just delete everybody who hasn't visited the site after 6 months. If you dont validate the account after 6 months .. I don't think that you have the motivation to bother to ever come back at all anyway.

Well, I try to apply the above, its a matter of me having time :)

Now that you mention it......... I have a question. I noticed at the bottom of the "activate email" it states To stop receiving this email, please visit this link: and I seem to recall seeing in my scheduled tasks log emails going out to some of these users that initially signed up months ago. Does vBulletin automatically resend validation emails at set intervals?

About the spammers i have installed a hack that easily removes al posts and bans the user with just 2 clicks from within a thread.

Well, recently bots using the email "humlog.com" have been attacking my website, I banned the e-mail via the Admin CP, stopped the problem. *Shrugs* As for human spammers, Use the warning system, and miserable users hack. Works wonders.