My colleague and I are building a new phpbb2 website to be a car racing forum/marketplace for high end racing cars. We purchased a bb2 template because we liked the look but already knew about bb3. We can't seem to stop bots from signing up as members and posting up advertisements. We installed an anti-bot software program which doesn't do anything, and running out of options. We don't know to continue on or try to make another bb3 template look as the styling does with our old bb2. Or if there is a good anti bot program out there this would help out tremendously.
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=645075 put logical question on signup form, which bots cannot handle. captcha is broken long ago.
actually, we put up 2 questions and 2 images as the bots can't understand questions nor look at images but I have no idea how they have gone around this, both those measures don't seem to work surprisingly?
it appears that either your forms are not active , i.e they are not required to be filled or some human worker is doing that work, to know that, check the spam comments, you will know if its automated or its human typed. you may wish to use following plugins as well https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=9087805 http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=41581 https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1340275 try googling, its really magic - you ask a question and it pops out the answer
okay, I will have my webmaster try out your links tomorrow, he was infact supposed to converse with other members on here over the weekend but there seems to always be constant delays
Required email validation is one thing which I think we haven't done yet, but that will change. We will incorporate one for sign ups. but I have a few more questions here; is bb3 much more secure from bots than bb2 is? what is the best anti-bot software program out there for bb2 and bb3? since we are 3 quarters of the way done with our bb2 website, would it be beneficial to drop the bb2 and convert over to the bb3 platform? if so, for what reasons? how easy or difficult is it to incorporate my styling features over to bb3? I assume that bb3 would be a better choice for in the long run for new added components coming out? but will there be any new components for bb2 coming down line for people such as myself in this situation with a bb2 website?
Do that and the spam accounts will drop drastically. Even with VB you will get spam if you don't verify emails.
I am glad to see that you like phpBB2 as well. That was my favorite version, I created over 50 mods for phpBB2. When phpBB3 came out I never visited that site since. I created two phpBB based forums with over a million posts each. Spam has never been an issue.
Bots get round captchas using services like death by capture and email validation is easy for the bot to deal with as well. On one of my sites 90% of the spam traffic came from China, so for me blocking all of chinese ip range pretty much solved the issue.