Stopping spam

supergurl · Joined: 20 Jun 2007 Posts: 7

I just started a new forum about a month ago. Beside the number one problem of getting the initial round of posters I developed a huge spam problem. The only posts I kept getting involved real estate and online drug sales. Both are completely unrelated to my forum. After trying four different spam programs. I came across one that really works well I haven't had a spam post in weeks. It is called Anti-spam for phpbb 2.0.

Darlene

APhillips86 · Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Posts: 5

I had that same problem when I started up a PHPBB forum. I kept getting spam bots posting porn messages all over my forum, which was a bad thing considering my forums were targeted towards teenagers Rolling Eyes

. Luckily I hadn't really began promoting my website so I didn't really have any "real" members at the time.

blakel12 · Joined: 25 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

I also use that mod on my forum to stop spam. I noticed spam started on my forum when I posted at one of the Talk Gold forums, but that could be a total coincidence.

Just food for thought.

Sven · Joined: 23 Mar 2008 Posts: 29

Yes, if you have a phpBB forum you should always install a anti-spambot mod. Otherwise befor you know it the porn / drugs / real estate bots are flooding your forum and your real members move away.

cobanerd · Joined: 11 Jun 2008 Posts: 30

Thanks for the tip supergurl. I know a friend and I just started a political forum, and before any of our invited members could even join we had our first spam. Go figure. Rolling Eyes

LissaValerian · Joined: 16 Jun 2008 Posts: 21

There are a few things that can be done to stop spam in a forum, and they usually involve the registration process. Most spambots actually bypass the actual registration page in most forums, so some alterations to the page, that include that "captchas" - those are the alphanumerics against some kind of distracting background as well as "human detecting" questions, such as "Name the third planet in our solar system:" Or something that is a little more abstract, "What are the first two digits found in the seventh question on this page:" (for example, that answer could be 24 or something like that).

That might require some technological tweaks of the forum page so you would need either some familiarity with the forum software, or access to a geek who does. Smile

I know that once I added these sorts of steps in my forum registration and then required everyone to be registered to post, that eliminated spam entirely.

conorod · Joined: 31 Aug 2008 Posts: 5

If you have a phpBB forum you should definately add a CAPTCHA image and a human detection question such as "What is 7 + 4".
Another good feature that was introduced in phpBB3 is the ability to automatically check the IP address of new members against 3 websites which list the IP address of spammers. This is very useful and effective, since new IP addresses are constantly added by administrators/moderators of forums.

Noidall · Joined: 26 Sep 2008 Posts: 5

Unfortunately spam is the downfall of many forums. I personally had a nice attack not two weeks ago. (I was using an old CAPTCHA similar to phpBB2's [which is easy to break with some decent matlab and OCR skills]) I upgraded to the new reCAPTCHA and haven't had a problem since.

phpBB is the easiest forum to create a spam-bot for unfortunately. It's free, so it's easy to get and look through, and it doesn't make very good use of validation during posts.