Hi, Some weeks ago I installed phpBB on our site for customer support purpose. Until now we don't have big problem, but there are two small ones: 1. Log on trouble: always I have to enter the username and password two times to log on. After first one, nothing happens. 2. Every day our forum gets about 10 newly registered users, but 9 from them are spammers, even I have email confirmation enabled. Actually I don't know how to filter them. Please, give me your advices. Thanks in advance.
For one the login and log out my be a cookie issue look up a cookie mod there was one i had to install because i had issues with people on firefox and it was not saveing there cookies. And for the spammers all you can do is add a pic code for people to type in the code befor thay regester. Hope that helps.
or, you could get rid of that phpbb and get real forum software thats 10 times better in every respect and its free. SMF
Check out the official phpBB forums. Your issuse have been addressed many times before and there are solutions there .
i had the same login issue at the phpbb forum. when i posted a message about it and asked what i could do, my thread was deleted and i was threatened with a ban. i wouldn't wipe my ass with phpbb.
Just a thought: 1) Your forum could be be set at www.domain.com, whilst located at forum.domain.com. When you login it is redirected to the other and at the other you are not logged in so it'll show the login page again. Something like that, I had an issue like it. (probably confusing) 2) With the bots I edited the template files and added a check when the user registers. I removed all the website and such links from the register form and when their profile is submitted it checks whether or not they are filled out. If the website is filled out it fails. I did this to stop people registering from a remote place and it seems to have stopped 90% of the bots I was getting. I was getting numerous a day and it has slowed to maybe 1 or 2 per week. The last 1 or 2 were killed by banning their email addresses.
Are bots handling captchas now? I have mulitple signs ups that are pill or porn related and they are passing the captcha test. I was guessing that they are finding sites by bot and finishing forms with cheap labor. I am using admin approval and banning users and banning certain domains (maybe I will ban soon). Still I am getting about 10 per day.
Simple trick Is to change the $_GET[password] at registration to something else like $_GET[securitypassword].... Here are also some advices: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=427852
I banned all *@*.ru and it helped alot with the spam signups. Most of the signups tended to have .ru on the end, so it has worked like a charm.
I noticed the same thing. In fact, my site was hacked a while back and they used that email to sign up. So I banned that eemail extention too.
There are some hacks to be installed and keep the spam out. Upgrade all the time to the latest version, check if the cookies are set correctly. You shouldn't have too many problems anymore. And the hacks that modify the registration page and insert some more required fields are always a good thing. As for SMF being 100 times better, please don't start me
The question is that why don't they (the phpBB guys) put those mods in their stock release? I am so sick of these pills and free porn guys registering at my forums as if it were some festival going on there at my website. I have tried banning *.ru, enabling captcha e.t.c. but this stuff doesn't help. Now I can't ban @yahoo or @hotmail addresses since my members use these free services too. To tell you the truth, Vbulletin (despite being a little expensive) is way better than all these free alternatives.. you get what you pay for.
They won't add it because phpBB is old... The next one, phpBB3 will most likely have all those stuff to stop the spammers.
I get pills and porn signups in ALL My forums. And I have all the big 5 scripts represented (VB, IPB, PhpBB, MyBB and SMF) fp.icontool.com These are some of the "nice" people to offer spam programs ... And as you can see most of the scripts are there And I am afraid this is not the only script