I left gust posting on in my phpBB forums and was hit by a massive amount of guest posts. I have the (just the) IPs of the offending spammers. What can I do to go after them?
if phpbb has an option to ban ip numbers then you should do that, other then that there isn't much you can do besides not allowing guest posting. also change your forum software. phpbb is a huge target for spammers.
Use the humaniser mod. It's worked for me, since I installed it four months ago I've had one spam post made. Previously, it was 3-4 a day.
.... I guess you should get your hosting firm block the ip's to resolve your issues...and we have the way to get your massive spammers issues solved for which please speak to us.......at: www.s4support.com and shamila.borges@s4support.com
I had an issue with spammers in one of my vB forums. I banned their IPs and they were still able to post. They were registering with one IP and posting with another. I finally banned all their IPs and they went away. If you have the capability to ban certain domains from registering ban gawab.com. That is a free email service used by a ton of spammers. Banning gawab.com virtually eradicated all spam. Hope this helps.
Be careful with the IP banning. If you get too aggressive with it, you can end up banning legit members too (i've had that happen on my forums).
ban gawab.com, and also perhaps mail.ru. often they try to register with email names that follow the same format: IE two letters, a number, two more letters @gawab.com or something. BUT - i had a new form of abuse recently, where someone registered legitimately, THEN, sent his spam email MANUALLY to hundreds of my members using my "email this member" feature. I had to disable the feature. he registered as "pascal_dikko4u@yahoo.com" or something lame like that. Hit me twice.
This topic on the phpbb forums has useful information for Prevention of bots and the like. http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=427852
Just ban the IP's via your site control panel and via the forum software, other than that there's not much you can do about it. Don't let it get to you, and move on. I'd suggest eliminating guest posting too.
You need to control your registrations better. No special software needed. Just turn on image verification and require email validation. That makes it nearly impossible for bots to register and confirm so they will have to register personally to spam you which after a few quick bans and deletions before they can get any exposure they'll realize it's not worth the time and move on.
This is where VB scores yet again, with a simple promotion of user group do not allow any registered users with minimum 25-50 posts to submit links or just don't parse it, just like here at dp.
Vb scores ... are you joking .... Anyone can SPAM anywhere.... If you have correct settings in phpbb no one will spam your board. 1. Activate email avtivation option 2. install a better captcha than the orginal one ( I have read the default captcha can be easily broken with new bots like Xrumer etc) 3. Never ban Ips that will decrease your user account 4. Have a look here to install some good Mods to stop Spamming http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=427852 I think that will easily help you out. Also I am going to install some. I am also getting spammed
And then go ask the 1000's of admins and see who had the board up to date and didn't install any badly coded mods.
I am using SMF and I am having the same problem. I set the email to require verification but it did not help much. Is anyone aware of any mods for SMF?
just do not allow Guest to post, m8. If the posts seems to be spammer, send them a PM. That what I did and i get response back from them saying they will post nicely. So it is a good thing to PM them too.