spammers on my forum

Zaphan58

Zaphan58

Zaphan58

Associate
Joined
30 Nov 2003
Posts
1,614
I run a small phpBB forum and am experiencing a lot of spammers signing up and posting links to porn and so on in my forums.

I have the image authetication on during sign up and am tempted to believe these are humans and not scripts from the posts that get posted.

Everytime it happens which is almost daily I delete the account and ban the I.P anything more I can do?
 
I had the same/similar problem with my old phpBB board, and nothing would stop the hordes of spambots signing up and posting links to porn and other dodgy sites. phpBB's email ban list was useless, you'd ban an entire network (freeweblolz.info etc) and that still wouldn't stop them signing up. I even used multiple spam protection addons, including the one that stops the bots bypassing the registration confirmation screen, which also did nothing to stop it.

Eventually I decided to just scrap the old board (it was becoming a real chore to maintain) and started a new one using PunBB. Now, when you ban an email network with PunBB, it actually DOES ban it, so I'm getting a lot less sign-ups from spammers than I used to (down to about 3 sign-ups a day from 10) but they still keep coming. I'm just hoping that one day, this spam disease that's plaguing me will go away.
 
Zaphan58 said:
I run a small phpBB forum and am experiencing a lot of spammers signing up and posting links to porn and so on in my forums.

I have the image authetication on during sign up and am tempted to believe these are humans and not scripts from the posts that get posted.

Everytime it happens which is almost daily I delete the account and ban the I.P anything more I can do?
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The same thing happened to me. I tried a variety of solutions, but the only one that worked 100% was converting the board to SMF. Very quick and simple, easily the best decision I've made with my board so far. In fact I havn't even had ONE spam post since I switched.
 
I shall give some of these suggestions a go. I 'l look into the smf boards although I have been quite impressed by phpBB3 betas I have played with so was looking to migrate to that once an RC is released. :)
 
The admin of a phpBB forum I frequent completely stopped spambots by tweaking the registration process.

The most effective way has been to modify the code myself and put a unique obstacle in their path. Since nobody else uses the same method, bots haven't been given the intelligence to overcome it. Not sure it would be possible either.

What I did was to hijack the ICQ number field (that was rarely used anyway). When someone attempts to sign up and they hit the 'submit' button on the registration page they are prompted to enter 12345 in the ICQ number field in order to complete the process. It's simple for a real user to read that and follow the instruction but a bot has no chance and the registration will fail.
Click to expand...
 
I was using a phpBB forum with just 3 registered users and spambots started signing up. I made the switch to IPB which is a whole lot nicer than phpBB. Although V3 of phpBB looks promising.
 
IPB is very nice... Probably the best software out there, but its commercial...

SMF has come a long way in the past 2 years, if both ipb and smf were free its a close call on which to choose.
 
But that's the same as the first reply. Too much effort imo.

Either install some custom registration form, or install a new forum.
 
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