Hi, I have a PhPBB forum and it was spammed by robots. I just saw many many links posted by robots from various IPs. I am wondering if there is legal issue for the forum owner if some links point to some bad websites. I have deleted all them and taken the forum down.
I would suggest going to the PHPBB help forum, there are some great mods on there to help beat the spam bots
Another victory for the spammers! If you really want to stop spammers head over to the following posts. http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=427852 http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=393503 http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=257755 And no, as long as you act and remove any illegal material as soon as possible I would suggest you are not acting illegally. Every forum gets spammed from time to time.
in theory you could take legal action but theres really no way to find the person behind it because if he/she was smart the ip would be masked or just be based off 20 different ips
I was going to ask the same question actually. Though I'm not sure if this user was using bots or just posting himself all over to be vindictive (because I busted him a few weeks earlier on some other shenanigans). Thanks very much for the links, I'll give them a shot!
Why would that be a victory for the spammers? I think that would be a loss for both (albeit much more for the forum owner). I do not think spammers intent is to shut down a site they are spamming, they are simply trying to spam it with their garbage.
Install the humaniser mod and turn off guest posting. Install the spam words mod if you need that extra bit of protection, you should be set. That said, I'd recommend you to wait up for the phpBB3 release, its definitely a new era of phpBB!
Use the default phpbb captcha, but modify it a little from the original in the PHP code. That seems to work for virtually all captchas, even simple ones. I think most bots are tailored to read specific captchas and changing it a bit will throw bots off, but still make it readable for humans. Plus all the other things said above are excellent suggestions. I wouldn't shut the forum down, I would just endeavor to keep out the spambots. http://www.kloth.net/internet/bottrap.php <-- this is good if you want to build a custom bot trap. Also, check out Bad-Behavior, if you use the generic version it's not AS effective, but I believe it checks all POSTs (i.e. important things) against spamhaus, so spammy IPs are immediately blocked, all you have to do is include one file at the top of your phpBB forum. Good luck, but don't give up. I haven't had a spam registration in several months. I would also remove all references to URLs, or add nofollow, but that can be a pain.