Ok, at first it was fun... China would come busting through my forum and I would do a word sensor and change everything about the words Nike to my sites name.. Now its getting old. I literally have banned every IP range " I thought" coming out of China. Now Im getting hit by Canadian Domains. I have set 75 seconds in between posts, registration is emailed and activated, must use numbers and letters for passwords... etc etc.. Im not getting it .. Using PHPBB software is current. They basically are using Xrummer, they register all the user names a day prior and then hit it the following day when they thinking Im sleeping. Any suggestions? Im pretty pi**sed ... Spam Cop is my new haven. Help --
well i am not very familiar on phbb, but you might want to check out the mods they have, I know for vb there are a couple of mods like no spam and limitations to help prevent things like this. If you know enough coding, you can put another section in the sign up sections to make them do something like add 2 + 2. Hope this helps Brandon
you might find this belpful too http://www.stopforumspam.com/downloads/ theres an sql you can import into your banned list of known forum spamming ip's ive actually put them into the firewall but theres a sql import file download there for phpbb
If you are on a dedicated look into mod_geoip for apache and you can ban by country effectively. Or you can just do inclusive entry too. It's awesome because you can just redirect the traffic or stop it.
Find an ReCaptcha modification for your forum. Install that and enable email activation and you will stop those spam bots.
I know vB has an option where the Admin must approve accounts before they are allowed to post (even after e-mail activation) ... See if you can find that for PhpBB Also, set an option that the first 2-3 posts (whatever you think is right) must be approved by Admin/Mod before they show up on the forum ...
It comes default with phpBB, and it works well. The only pain beyond that is deleting the bad accounts. If it's with phpBB2 then expect 100s still without addition anti-bot registration mods. If it's with phpBB3 the number should drop alot. Try adding one of those anti-bot questions, or the recaptcha as previously mentioned. So what.
The way we take care of this problem at VWF is we check all new posts 3 or 4 times daily and once we have spotted a spammer we delete his posts and then edit his account. Changing his password and his email account as well. This account will not be accessible again by anyone. I think this works pretty well with the vBulletin forum software because it takes to much time for the spammers to keep creating new accounts that will get them no where in what they are trying to achieve. It also helps that we have mods that are located all over the globe so "The Sun Never Sets" on the forum so to speak. Someone is always on watch.