how to stop message board spammers?
 

my girlfriend recently started up a forum on phpbb3 and she is getting swamped by a shitload of spambots signing up to her board. she has it set to verify before they can post but just going through the spam signups is taking up too much time. is there any way to stop these guys from signing up at all?

You need to put a captcha in place on the register page. You'll have to experiment to find a decent one that will keep out the bots and still allow regular human beings to recognize the characters.

Of course bots can read almost all captcha BUT the ones that are that advanced aren't normally going after phbb boards cause it isn't worth the time and effort I guess. I have 4 such boards and I was able to stop that shit dead cold using this method. :)

Block IP address.

Captcha?

I have same problem on phpbb3 so i switched to another board.Toobad there is not one mod for phpbb2 made for phpb3 too,it's a captcha mod where during registration you need to pick cats pictures between car and cat pictures.No bot can pass such captcha plus is look good.But that mod doesnt exits for phpbb3 unfortunately.So go with phpbb2 or other forum.

there is captcha and the users even have to verify themselves by clicking a link in their email but they still get through.

Yep. You block the IP range from their countries or something to that effect.

There was a post on GFY some months back that told you how to do it. I was having the same exact problem. I blocked their e-mail extensions. I blocked IP's but there was something recommended on GFY that finally did the trick.

Since then I have never had an issue. I mean never.
:pimp

All boards eventually get owned by WoW

htaccess :

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null


order allow,deny
deny from 74.92.6.44
deny from 216.95.187.77
deny from 69.95.191.147
deny from 67.25.238.10
deny from 209.37.213.66
deny from 216.655.178.220
deny from 207.44 <===== blocks all IPs starting with 207.44
allow from all

on one of my forums i added a question for people to answer, like whats 6 + 1 or something like that then if they get it right they can register if not they cant. before that went up i had an smf board on the domain that got just hammered with spam and when i switched to phpbb3 in like 2 days there was 60+ spam members that had signed up before i put that into play. after i put it in though (the question) i don't think a single spam bot has signed up, at least hasn't made a single post

It depends on the "spam"--is it mostly from people posting untitled links? Or are they spamming for backlinks? If the latter, making the forum NO FOLLOW will take care of the bulk of the problem. If it's for direct traffic spam, putting up a captcha system might minimize it.

sig spot here because i am so meta

their memeberships are never approved so they never post but its just a pain in the ass to go through so many new members that are fake. they get by the captcha. i like the question idea. is there a mod or way to add this to phpbb?

:1orglaugh:Oh crap

Dude if you use the right captcha they won't get past it. One of my boards is a pro wrestling board and it's pretty big and read by wrestlers and fans around the world. Captcha stopped all bots and spammers. Been doing so since April of 2004

I believe we tweaked the captcha one in that entire time. People just aren't gonna take the time to go after small phpbb boards once you put up a small defense.

Now if you were the Microsoft Forum or some other big target...you can bet they would fly right past captcha But my experience says "no" they won't for your small forum.

Another way to piss off spammers posting on forums is to use the Censored Words in the admins panel and change words like "Viagra" to " "spam" or what ever you like. You basicaly change the words that they use to advertise to someting stupid :thumbsup

Damn i just found 3000 registred bots on one my forum and prune was causing load up to 40 so i had to stop and delete entire forum instead.Punbb is much better anyway then phpbb3.

Not to thread jack or anything,

But I am looking to buy stickies on surfer forums. If you are selling or thinking of selling send me details to paymealot at gmail. :thumbsup


Good luck getting rid of the spammers.

I just found this solution:
http://bbantispam.com/atc/
and it seems it works.

This guys are unstopable and they are annoying

This is a job for Boxxy!

try this one, it works very good:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

Even the most advanced captcha images have been cracked. They can crack math, select the proper words from paragraphs, everything.

People don't go after your sites directly, a bot/spider finds it and just keeps going. The owner of the bot doesn't care or even know if your forum gets the spam. At that, they are almost all sharing the same code, so once you beat them, you beat 99% of them.

But real captcha crackers, they don't play games on forums, forums have no value to them. But member areas... No captcha protection in the world is strong enough to stop them.