Stop Forum Spamers
Lot of black-hat seo, link builders and stupid webmasters found posting links to their web site on message board and guest book is easy to drive traffic to their web site.
Now there are virus, worms and spambots, that can signup your message board and get listed on your memberlist page, profile page. Some spambots can even post spam messages on your forum.
This made running a message board more difficult. Forum webmasters need to moderate their forums and stop the spamers and spam bots. Cleaning up forum need lot of effors when your forum become popular or target of spamers.
Most forum use community support to keep the forum clean, stop spamers. This is done by selecting some of the active forum members as MODERATOR.
phpBB forum provide some way to stop spamers.
Captcha
Captcha is image verification system, that shows an image on signup forum. Visitor need to type in this number correctly on signup forum. Only human can read this number. Spambots can't do it (research is going on to break CAPTCHA
User Verification
phpBB have 3 options, you can set this in Admin control panel, config menu
Enable account activation - None / User / Admin
If you select None, users can register with out proper email id, this will make more spam on your forum. In our forums, we have disabled this, so if you set to "None", it will be considered as "User"
User - user need to click on a link send to his email id. This will verify the user have a valid email.
Admin - when user signup, admin is send a mail. Admin need to activate the account. If your forum is small, you may opt for this.
or
While forum spamming either caused by bots or humans are not a security threat, it’s still very much a nuisance to the forum admin.
I have several phpBB forums which have running for a couple of years now and they were like magnets to spammers especially spam bots.
Deleting these spam bots manually was tiring and time wasting.
At some point, I turned off automatic registration completely and requested potential members to write to me manually if they want to join the forum. This of course presented another hurdle to users and had decreased the registration rate.
You can enable the built-in Visual Confirmation during registration but this measure can be easily defeated even by the simplest spam bots.
Then I searched for a MOD that I can install and came across Textual Confirmation by olpa.
Textual Confirmation (TC) works by asking potential member a question during the registration process. This question is selected at random from a collection of questions you’ve created beforehand in the Administration Panel so you can essential ask anything.
If the user gives the wrong answer, TC rejects the registration. You and the community spam database will be notified if this happens.
Yes TC can still be cracked but so far it works like a charm on my forums. I can leave them unmonitored for days (especially when I were preoccupied with other stuff) and come back to see not a single spam posting of Britney Spears naked pictures among others.
If you have phpBB forum and tired of spam bots, I recommend you to install TC to combat the problem.
Lot of black-hat seo, link builders and stupid webmasters found posting links to their web site on message board and guest book is easy to drive traffic to their web site.
Now there are virus, worms and spambots, that can signup your message board and get listed on your memberlist page, profile page. Some spambots can even post spam messages on your forum.
This made running a message board more difficult. Forum webmasters need to moderate their forums and stop the spamers and spam bots. Cleaning up forum need lot of effors when your forum become popular or target of spamers.
Most forum use community support to keep the forum clean, stop spamers. This is done by selecting some of the active forum members as MODERATOR.
phpBB forum provide some way to stop spamers.
Captcha
Captcha is image verification system, that shows an image on signup forum. Visitor need to type in this number correctly on signup forum. Only human can read this number. Spambots can't do it (research is going on to break CAPTCHA
User Verification
phpBB have 3 options, you can set this in Admin control panel, config menu
Enable account activation - None / User / Admin
If you select None, users can register with out proper email id, this will make more spam on your forum. In our forums, we have disabled this, so if you set to "None", it will be considered as "User"
User - user need to click on a link send to his email id. This will verify the user have a valid email.
Admin - when user signup, admin is send a mail. Admin need to activate the account. If your forum is small, you may opt for this.
or
While forum spamming either caused by bots or humans are not a security threat, it’s still very much a nuisance to the forum admin.
I have several phpBB forums which have running for a couple of years now and they were like magnets to spammers especially spam bots.
Deleting these spam bots manually was tiring and time wasting.
At some point, I turned off automatic registration completely and requested potential members to write to me manually if they want to join the forum. This of course presented another hurdle to users and had decreased the registration rate.
You can enable the built-in Visual Confirmation during registration but this measure can be easily defeated even by the simplest spam bots.
Then I searched for a MOD that I can install and came across Textual Confirmation by olpa.
Textual Confirmation (TC) works by asking potential member a question during the registration process. This question is selected at random from a collection of questions you’ve created beforehand in the Administration Panel so you can essential ask anything.
If the user gives the wrong answer, TC rejects the registration. You and the community spam database will be notified if this happens.
Yes TC can still be cracked but so far it works like a charm on my forums. I can leave them unmonitored for days (especially when I were preoccupied with other stuff) and come back to see not a single spam posting of Britney Spears naked pictures among others.
If you have phpBB forum and tired of spam bots, I recommend you to install TC to combat the problem.
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