SPAM on phpBB

Hi there,
Lately I find out that many community forums base on phpBB forum getting spam message from adult websites. It's seems to be auto messages. Is that a bug in PhpBB, how does it happened? and the last question, how to stop it? 10x.

 

you'll need to find some plugins to prevent spammers from using your forum. i wrote my own captcha to prevent spammers from signing up on my forums, and that is the first thing i'd recommend to you. phpbb's built-in captcha has already been broken by the phpbb spam bots, so you'll need to get a plugin for phpbb and possibly re-write part of it yourself, for instance change the fonts used or the color ranges of the pixels.

I read that you could use Akismet (popular anti-spam plugin for wordpress) with phpbb, but I don't know how well this works. here's the link to the phpbb akismet "hack" --

http://www.randombyte.net/wiki/phpbb_akismet

 

I found a mod called Spamark very helpful. It utilizes a system similar to email spam filters. See http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uxhz/spamark/

The biggest advantage compared to other spam plugins is that the experience for the user doesn't change (no captcha or stuff like that).

 

I have been facing the same issue on one of my phpBB forums.
NiB... how is your exp. with this hack?

 

What i try to do before I am doing one of the advice I got here is to require user to confirm the register by email.

 

At least for registration spam, in my experience, that doesn't work. They'll register anyway because their registrations get their profile into the memberlist. I've disabled display of inactive profiles in the memberlist, but that hasn't stopped them since, even though there is no longer a benefit for them.

Another easy way of dealing with it is to remove the profile options for signature and homepage (which removes their incentive to spam), and then add an additional required field (like birthday) to the form. You don't have to save it, but it's something that any human can easily figure out, and the bots aren't programmed to supply that information, and since it's required, it won't allow their registration.

On the offchance that somebody running the bot notices failed regs, they'll either remove your site from their list, or go to find out what changed (or fill it out manually) and see that there's no longer any motivation for them to register.

That's what worked for me, but I REALLY didn't want to add a captcha and make it more difficult for people to register quickly.

 

there are a couple of SPAMMING softwares out there for spamming the forums, unfortunately, thats really bad to see. However you can avoid this is if you ask registering members to VALIDATE their account before they can post anything, spammers dont have time to validate 1000 of emails, and their trick simply wont work, it even works with IPB as well.

regards

 

Sorry for digging this up but thought this would be nice for those who have searched through Google to here. I'm also recently interested in anti-spam, so I'd like to offer some suggestions.

Some articles that might help you in preventing spams in phpBB:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001001.html
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=393503
http://www.kavoir.com/2009/03/phpbb...am-options-for-fresh-forum-installations.html

If all the measures fail you can still gain upper hand with the renowned ReCaptcha:
http://www.recaptcha.net

Or some interesting photo captchas:
http://vidoop.com/captcha/

 

Very useful information,

Thanks alot.