Nowadays there is a tough war between spam generators and various anti-spam tools and measures. Both continuously employ new technologies and methods to become more efficient. Thus, spam generators have employed bots to disseminate information by placing comments on various websites and even to do so on sites where registration is needed (the bots can create a user account for themselves).

The Current Situation In The Field

 In the same context, there are even platforms that pay human members for guessing captcha codes from images, solving puzzles, recognizing images in objects, answering questions. This activity happens in real-time and it allows coupling these user verification methods with other actions (e.g. spambot activity, armies of human spammers) in order to target a huge number of sites (e.g. passing the registration process in order to perform other actions later).

Using Automatic Checks In Databases Of Blacklisted IPs And Emails

Given the above mentioned, often, it makes huge sense to just block the physical IPs of these entities or to verify the emails used for registration or from which messages are delivered. For anyone to be able to check IP of the website for being in a spam database, an up-to-date list of such blacklisted IPs is needed. The search can be performed manually but using an API comes with huge benefits in productivity since it allows you to automate your searches in the future.

The mentioned blacklists may be searched by:

• IP
• email address
• subnet;
• domain.

In turn, each spam record may containinformation about:

• the date when it was discovered
• the country of origin
• the number of times it was reportedas spam
• the emails used from these IPs
• the nicknames used when registeringfrom these IPs
• the type of attacks carried fromthese IPs
• the status (suspicious vsblacklisted)
• information about the ISP.

Using blacklists can help to efficiently filter real users with an interest in your website from spambots without requiring users to go through a myriad of verification tests (captcha, puzzles). This allows seamless integration of spam checks that would greatly improve the user experience. Obviously, you must ensure that the blacklist is constantly updated and as comprehensive as possible. Since assembling such a qualitative list requires effort and expertise, it makes sense to contract the services of an experienced leader on the market.

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Such a company would normally provide plugins for your platform that would send parameters of actions executed by users (e.g. commenting, registering) to the servers of the company, where these are automatically processed (compared to the blacklist and analyzed for content). If no problem is found, the user action is validated and in the case of the opposite, the registration attempt or the comment is blocked.

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Overall, the process described would enable fast and efficient real-time filtering of actions by spam generators without impairing the experience of your users.