Damn rotten spammers :)

Post by **VilleK** » Sat Oct 08, 2011 5:35 pm

From being blessed with relatively small amount of spammers the last years they are coming back with a vengeance to this forum now with several new registrations each day. Any suggestions how to address this? We could upgrade to latest phpbb or other forum software provided the upgrade will keep all attached files etc.

jph_wacheski · Post by **jph_wacheski** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 5:33 pm

don't those 'human' readable entry boxes stop bots? Are these people spamming by hand or does it seem they are automated? I don't recall but does the process require an email check,. publish spammer emails and we can spam them!

Post by **VilleK** » Sat Oct 15, 2011 1:51 pm

Spamming is big business and has created a large infrastructure of sophisticated forum-bots capable of passing all layers of spam-verications, including advanced captchas and similar. I've tried different methods of forum registration tests before but none seems to stop them now. Probably there are human spammers too working from third-world countries getting small amount of payment for every successfull registration. I ban ip-addresses and whole email-domains but there always seems to be new ones available for spammers.

Probably I will soon upgrade to newer phpbb because there are more methods against spammers there.

jph_wacheski · Post by **jph_wacheski** » Sun Oct 16, 2011 12:26 pm

what a sad state of affairs,. it seems to have little to do with advertising as who would respond to such ads? Perhaps the global aggregate of spam contains encoded messages,.. or the proto singularity,. waiting to awaken.

Post by **VilleK** » Mon Oct 17, 2011 7:11 am

It is a Search Engine Optimization technique: generate links to a target site on as many places as possible, forums, blog comments, fake websites etc. The search engine web crawlers will find the links and rank the target site higher in searches because sites with many incoming links are assumed to be more important. So it does not matter if no human ever clicks or even sees the link, as long as the crawlers do.

StevenM · Post by **StevenM** » Sun Nov 13, 2011 9:51 pm

Would an auto-removel system for inactive accounts work? Could back fire - but I am aware of a few sites that remove accounts after one or two months of inactivity.

After someone has met the criteria of a legitimate user - you can probably make an account safe form removal too.

Managing all this can be time consuming - but I do believe that most of it is an automated - aside from setting the options.

nadams · Post by **nadams** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 5:11 pm

There is some good information here:
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/que ... e-anti-bot

My personal experiences - create a set of questions that randomly get cycled when a person is registering. Even though on my forum we had static questions - when we first had it implemented we had 0 spam for awhile. The key here is doing something unique that isn't out of the box. The questions also don't have to be hard - like "What is 5 + 3?"
I'm sure there is a phpBB plugin for this.

Also, instead of using the builtin CAPTCHA - use reCAPTCHA, I personally think that is a lot better security wise. And I'm sure there is a phpBB plugin for this as well.

Post by **VilleK** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 6:36 pm

Good suggestions. I found a recaptcha for phpbb2 here: http://code.google.com/apis/recaptcha/docs/phpbb.html

Do you have any experience with phpbb and installing mods? I have some mods installed already and I don't want to lose those changes. I'll gladly accept some more help with this because I'm not too comfortable with php

nadams · Post by **nadams** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 7:27 pm

VilleK wrote:Good suggestions. I found a recaptcha for phpbb2 here: http://code.google.com/apis/recaptcha/docs/phpbb.html

Do you have any experience with phpbb and installing mods? I have some mods installed already and I don't want to lose those changes. I'll gladly accept some more help with this because I'm not too comfortable with php

I have had some experience with phpBB many years ago. I remember it was a very tedious task installing mods, but someone created a "mod" installer called EasyMod: http://easymod.sourceforge.net/readme/
Basically you point it towards the mod file with all the instructions and it parses and does the leg work for you. Worked fairly well if you don't have a ton of mods.

Personally I've moved away from phpBB to SMF http://download.simplemachines.org/ it works very well and already has a plugin system built in.