Inside this blog you'll mostly find information related to this website. Look for posts about new pages on this site, posts on traffic statistics for this site, and much more.
For the Internet surfer I'll be posting about creative websites that I find, interesting websites, and fun things to do while online.
For the webmaster I'll be posting about powerful website programs, ways to make money with your site, and my own case studies and experiments.
How to find out the IP address of spambot forum members
This entry was posted on August 19, 2007 and is filed under Webmaster.
Are spam domains registered on your forum?
Finding and eradicating the never ending army of new spambots that register on forums all over the web is a time consuming task for some webmasters like myself. Lately it seems as if more and more of these pesky bots are registering at the forums on this site. I had a hard time finding some really good information for the webmaster that's a novice in this area so I decided to create this post for others that are seeking information on the IP addresses of their forum members.
Searching for suspected spam domains
To get started, open up your forum control panel and navigate to the members section so you can view your forum member's email addresses. For example let's say you have a member that has the email address "example@mail.ru" and you want to find out if this is indeed a spambot domain. All you do is open up Google and search "mail.ru" or "Is mail.ru spam?" and if the domain is in fact a spam domain, it'll usually be one of the first few Google results on the page. It's up to you to determine if the domain your searching for is really a malicious spambot so remember to complete a thorough search for all suspected domains.
Let's say you've found a spam domain that registered as a real user on your forums and now you want to find the IP address for that suspected spam domain. I'll stick with the "mail.ru" example from above. Start by opening up a new browser window and check out this website which offers a powerful service that finds the traceroute, ping, and name server information for any domain name. Once you get to the network-tools.com website, check the box that says "lookup" and type "mail.ru" or the domain name your looking to find the IP address for into the content box and then hit the submit button. When the results return you'll see the IP address for the domain name that you entered.
Now you'll have an IP address in hand for your new unwanted forum member. You can now enter the that IP into your forum's administrator control panel. Regardless of the type of forums you run, there will be some kind of IP address banning section or spam control section. Just paste the spambot's IP address that you grabbed from network-tools website into your ban list and then you're done.
