Spambots

[rude]

Damn. Seems that this page has been "discovered" by spambots now. Any ideas how to prevent them? I've increased the difficulty of the CAPTCHA, but I have a feeling that's not going to do much.

[farvardin]

Any ideas how to prevent them?

how about giving our LÖVE to spambots too?

I think increasing the captcha should be enough. I had problem with spammers on another forum, the captcha solved this. You can also make a validation for the registration if it's not enough.

[osgeld]

You can also make a validation for the registration if it's not enough.

this usually keeps them away

[Sardtok]

You could also install a spam filter. Which will filter posts and flag suspicious posts as spam which will have to be controlled by admins.
I use a filter known as Akismet, there should be a plug-in for PhpBB that uses it.

www.akismet.com

It's free for personal use as long as you don't earn more than $500 a month off the website.

[osgeld]

if its needed thats a decent idea, but over at irshell.org, which is the biggest site i admin, we have no craptula, and just an email verification, and have not had a problem with it ... ever

another hint to keep them from finding you

at the bottom of the forums you have

Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group

replace this with an image containing the same information, and (optionally) instead of linking directly to the phpbb site, send it to a "credits" page, thats local to your server, containing the phpbb link, and who did the artwork / theme, admins, blah blah blah

that way when "they" scan google or whatever looking for phpbb (or any other popular forum) based sites, YOU wont show up

also if you havent, change your cookie settings so that they do not show phbpp_session or whatever, thats another place their spiders look

[rude]

One of these days I'll have to go through all users and cross reference with the stopforumspam.com list. I had to remove three of the recent users just now. >_<

Does anyone have experience with the Anti-Spam ACP mod? Also, I enabled user activation, although I would rather not ...

[rude]

Added a non-standard security question on the registration page (tip from osgeld). E-mail activation did keep them away, though. In the admin control panel, there's a list of all "inactive users", and there were about ten obvious spambot accounts in there.

We'll see how well this works out ...

[qubodup]

Added a non-standard security question

Are you talking about this peculiar piece?

wut.png (13.55 KiB) Viewed 4468 times

[rude]

Wut.png indeed. What have you done, you insane german?

[osgeld]

you could also do something like

"four plus three"