Hi guys, My forum has recently been attacked by registrations from spambots and as a result I've banned a range of email addresses. are there any other ways to stop this?
think i posted in the wrong section, can someone help me move this to Design & Development > Site & Server Administration > Forum Management Thanks!
I've had similar problems, what I did what go to adminstration panel > General Admin > Configuration > Then sen "Enable account activation" to "Admin"
I go thru this too. There have been a few helpful threads on the official phpbb forums on this situation. Step one is to Make sure only members can post and enable the visual confirmation. After that, its a matter of installing mods. I have had limited success banning email addresses and IPs, in some cases its necessary to ban *@baddomain.com. I also banned all .ru domains as no users in that area are relevant to the forum.
How did you ban all .ru domains? I've banned *@mail.ru, *@yandex.ru, etc., but I didn't think it was possible to ban *.ru. Does that work?
I'm using easy bot stopper http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=375262 Visual confirmation also works good.
Is there a plugin that lets you stop a post from being posted based on certain keywords for phpbb2? Like if free viagra is in the title the post will not go thru. I want to keep my forum registration free but theres certain spam bots posting some pretty iffy stuff. So I've had to disable the board until I can get this fixed.
Of all the complaints about phpBB spam seems to be the most common. That is the main reason I went with a paid board. Maybe you could take up a collection from your members and upgrade to a paid alternative? vB is nice, and does not cost a heck of a lot for what you get. Maybe ask your member base to donate to the community to make it better? That's how I got the cash for my forum to run under the vB flag at least. And I hear that IMPEX is a wonderful tool that can convert your existing content to a vB format so you'll not loose any data... Best of luck, Q
That would be cool, but I have no real community just about 4 or 5 real users that have posted once or twice. The other 1826 are spam bots. loads of .cn and .ru email addresses from the spam bots.
I got the funds from 10 users to get hosting ($50), buy related domains ($50) and to get the vB full license ($160) and even had enough left over to buy a few paid addons. And not a penny of the money I got came from my own pocket... I gave these 10 members special life time privileges on the board by creating a usergroup called "Founders". I assume you already have the domain & the host... now all you'll need is $85 for a leased vB, ask your core members for $20 a piece and you may get what you need, or at least lower your own costs. Because, as I understand it, the only way to beat the phpBB issue with spam, is to change platforms...
You could build in image verification on sign up and on each and every post. You could also make it even harder by creating a human interaction. For example: Show an image of a "Ball" and ask "What do you see?" The answer can have any regex or iteration of "*ball*" Not to hard to build in and I have seen this done on quite a few boards. Seems like the search portion is where you need to protect because bots query the board for a topic then reply to it.
True I have been leaning more towards vB, it seems to be the most popular board right now. Theres already modifications like that, I dont mind the spam bots too much they do give me extra hits and that helps my adbrite rank. But they have been posting some iffy sexual stuff so I had to shut down the board. I just want to be able to block certain words from being posted so the worst spam bots cant post their images and links.
does that mod stop all spam posted by bots? a friends forum keeps getting targetted by bots posting pics and such in new threads.
These mods are more than enough to stop the spam: Better Captcha phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=473222 Anti-Spam: Only Active Members Can Post URLs phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=464628 And from ACP enabling the user activation by self.
If you don't mind I would suggest you use SMF. SMF has a very strong SPAM bot protection. I just hope the phpBB team would improve this aspect of their software. This is one strong reason I've been hesitant to run a phpBB forum site.
SMF is user friendly forum system but very, very SEO unfriendly. If you don't care about your positions in search engines SMF is OK.