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Spambots

Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 8:54 am
by 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.

Re: Spambots

Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 9:48 am
by farvardin
Any ideas how to prevent them?
how about giving our LÖVE to spambots too? :joker:

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.

Re: Spambots

Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 2:01 pm
by osgeld
farvardin wrote: You can also make a validation for the registration if it's not enough.
this usually keeps them away

Re: Spambots

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 3:37 am
by 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.

Re: Spambots

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 3:45 am
by 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

Re: Spambots

Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 8:48 pm
by 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 ...

Re: Spambots

Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:07 pm
by 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 ...

Re: Spambots

Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:59 pm
by qubodup
rude wrote:Added a non-standard security question
Are you talking about this peculiar piece?
wut.png
wut.png (13.55 KiB) Viewed 4501 times

Re: Spambots

Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 11:40 pm
by rude
Wut.png indeed. What have you done, you insane german? :rofl:

Re: Spambots

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 2:33 am
by osgeld
you could also do something like

"four plus three"