I've been hunting for this for a while with no joy, so before I'd give up I thought I would ask here - Does anyone know of a plugin for PHPBB3 that means that users need to be recommended before they can register? My forum is for a small community that gets new members once every few weeks, where as the spam bots are registering at the rate of several a day.
PHPBB3 - can you require recommendations to register?
- Thread starter Linkex
- Start date
I don't think there is.
I run a forum and since i added a new registration question of "What is 4 less than 9?" with "5" being the only allowed answer i've only had 2 spambots in the last 6 months, with 3 users registering per day on average. Maybe worth a try.
I already have the capatcha and question thing set up. However you did just give me an idea - I can just set the question to be "What is the password" and set the answer to something I only give out to people I want to join 
Woot, problem solved
Woot, problem solved 
Associate
- Joined
- 13 Sep 2003
- Posts
- 1,642
- Location
- Oxford, UK
You can use the built in Q&A system to do what you want.
Set the Q&A to say, please email the admin on <this email address> to get the code to enter here.
They email you, you send them the right code (such as FKW7HC) and they can register.
The bots don't know the code, they can't guess it, they won't email you either and so you have your built in invitation only system.
Q&A can also stop bots by asking things like 'enter the first 4 letters of GKWIS63LHDU'
Although maths questions are ok, they can be googled and so aren't nearly as effective as random letter questions, or anything else you can't google like 'what word does it say at the top of our index page in blue text' or something like that.
Set the Q&A to say, please email the admin on <this email address> to get the code to enter here.
They email you, you send them the right code (such as FKW7HC) and they can register.
The bots don't know the code, they can't guess it, they won't email you either and so you have your built in invitation only system.
Q&A can also stop bots by asking things like 'enter the first 4 letters of GKWIS63LHDU'
Although maths questions are ok, they can be googled and so aren't nearly as effective as random letter questions, or anything else you can't google like 'what word does it say at the top of our index page in blue text' or something like that.
When I was running a forum I changed the "website:" field on registration (as 99% of spam bots at the time filled it out) so that it wasn't visible to humans
and only allowed users to register who didn't fill out that field - worked pretty well for awhile tho latterly some bots seemed to random fill out extra fields or not which got some through.