[IPS] Spam Service Updates

[Administrator]

Our proprietary Spam Service which was launched in 2009 has been a very popular feature for IP.Board license holders. This service (which is included at no additional cost for all active license holders) is queried during account registration on your IP.Board installation and will respond to the query with a flag to indicate the likelihood that the registration might be a spammer. You can control how your site should react to the various responses the service may return in the admin control panel, and combined with other anti-spam tools in IP.Board you can help prevent spam registrations from occurring on your site.

While the system is constantly "learning" and blocking new spam signups, we have performed some updates to the service recently that we feel will help the system respond even quicker and more reliably to spam account registrations.

First, Some Stats

For those interested, we have some interesting statistics to share with you.

To date, the spam service has responded to over 58 million requests! The service has responded to almost 163,000 requests in the last 24 hours alone, and the service continues to respond to between 5,000 and 10,000 more requests day over day.

A total of over 23 million user registrations have been blocked (i.e. a status code of 3 or 4 was returned by the spam service) to date. That's 23 million spammers we've helped you prevent from disrupting your community.

Quicker Responses

With the recent updates we performed, the system will more quickly respond to new spammer accounts than it did previously. It is important that the system do not treat a single report of a spammer as a permanent block on that account of course, however we identified several areas where the algorithms used could be tweaked to more quickly identify potential spammers and have performed these changes. Additionally, by use of decaying flags (treating newer reports with a higher priority than older accounts), the system can more quickly respond to new spammer threats.

Project Honeypot Integration

We have integrated our spam service with the popular Project Honeypot service. This means that all account registrations are checked through Project Honeypot, and the threat score that is returned from this service is used to help determine the likelihood of the IP address being associated with a spammer.

Stop Forum Spam Integration

In addition to integration with Project Honeypot, we have integrated the IPS Spam Service with Stop Forum Spam. Our spam service will check the Stop Forum Spam email address and IP address databases and use any information found here to help weight and score the likelihood that the registration is coming from a spammer.

It is important to note that we do not rely directly on the Stop Forum Spam data to determine a spammer status, but are instead using the data from this service to help weight the overall score based on all of the flags we have available.

Enterprise Spam Mitigation

If you are in a load balanced or cloud environment, you may wish to take advantage of this new offering which allows calls to the spam service from multiple origins using the same license key. Additionally, this service allows greater control over your spam mitigation service including weighting algorithm preferences and customized blacklists and whitelists. This addon service is available for $100/6 months. For more information, please contact our sales department.

Collectively we feel the changes we have made to the service will benefit all IPS customers who are making use of our IPS Spam Service. We hope these changes help your community fight the threat of spam more rigorously and more reliably than ever before.

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