Forum Help - Spam

[ChrisRyan]

With all the clubs out there, and their attached forums I doubt UJ is the only one getting slammed with spammers.

What are others doing to prevent spammers?

We are running PHPBB 3, and currently I have to activate every user, which is a huge pain, not to mention people who probably give up because some times I can't get on to activate users for a few days... Yesterday alone We had 12 people register, and I ended up deleting all 12 accounts without activating them... viagra or cialis are not a common forum names in our sport

I am in the thought right now of banning all mainstream free email services gmail, yahoo, hotmail, ect. Before I do that, just wanted to see if anyone else had any ideas.

Thanks

Chris

[tammylynn]

DWE runs IPB (Invision Power Board) We just upgraded to the new release and I went from going through an average of 2-4 pages of validations-mostly spammers to one page or less of real accounts. Most of the security features are automated for us.

[Cookiemanx7]

We had the exact same problem a while ago and at first we just banned their IP's but we quickly realized they have to many to be effective. So we added verification questions to our forum that requires a brain to produce the correct answer, if not the forum rejects your registration.

Some of our Questions needed for registration are.....

1 Are you Human? (Yes or No)
2 5+5= ? (2 digits)
3 What is the capital of Massachusetts? (City)
4 What is the abriviation for the is clubs name? (3 letters)
5 What year is it currently? (4 digits)

[JayZR2]

There are a plethora of "anti bot" registration tools for php.BB

[Paul]

:shrug: No problems here.

[RTrac1]

we turned on the forum verification thing and require admin activation. although, since we turned on the verification I havent had any spammers that i had to deny,

Here's a good tool for checking their IP or forum name..
http://www.stopforumspam.com/

[Liza]

My IPB forum has the same problem...I have an upgrade on my list of things to do.

Spam user names crack me up. One of today's: WOWGOLDdick

[rblank]

"I Love Gooooooolllllldddddddd..................."

[tammylynn]

Spam user names crack me up. One of today's: WOWGOLDdick

I know, I almost didn't mind having to go through the pages for that reason. Some of them were pretty funny.

I know the IPB upgrade we just did made a HUGE difference.

[Smtty58]

You can add another admin if you can't activate accounts daily. You can put an .htaccess file in the root of the forum and ban the IP block, like this:

194.8.75.

I don't remember the exact syntax, Google should have plenty of info.

Another thing I do, I don't delete spammers, just leave them unactivated. This way that user name is already taken, the next spammer that tries to use it gets denied. Cuts down on the number of attempts to register.

[ChrisRyan]

I updated from PHPBB 3.03 to 3.04 and installed the Question mod Cookiemanx7 recommend... seems to have stopped them (for now)

Thanks everyone.

[Scott]

I updated from PHPBB 3.03 to 3.04 and installed the Question mod Cookiemanx7 recommend... seems to have stopped them (for now)

Thanks everyone.

Yeah, I was going to recoment you make sure you update your forums software.

All I had to do with the rally is require Admin activation and they stopped shortly after that.

[Cookiemanx7]

I updated from PHPBB 3.03 to 3.04 and installed the Question mod Cookiemanx7 recommend... seems to have stopped them (for now)

Thanks everyone.

Glad to hear it helped

[rawlus]

the best defense against the spam bots is running enhanced reCaptcha during the registration (this is the hard-to-read image that has text and numbers that the user has to re-type into a text form field)

if you run the latest and greatest of recaptcha, it is extremely difficult for bots to make it through the registration process automatically. you will still get some russian and chinese among other registrations from actual people behind a keyboard, but that will be a substantial reduction over what you're likely getting now from bots.

here is the reCaptcha plugin for phpBB - read the instructions carefully, and confirm the plugin is suitable for the version of phpBB you have on this board. i make no warranties on this - i prefer IPB over phpBB.

http://recaptcha.net/plugins/phpbb/