Preventing forum spammers

[zimmerframe]

How do Idnetters prevent spammers from wrecking havoc on these forums? 

My clans website has been plauged by these automated nightmares.  I'm not involved in the website upkeep but would welcome any suggestions of help.  We have had to lock down our public forums to stop these sometimes vulgar automated postings.

We use a website based on phpBB 2.0.10.  I am told that this is the problem, its an old version.  Is this correct?

[Sebby]

Rik is the man to answer this one, but I believe it's a combination of things: blocklist to prevent known spammers from registering, a review of each new member, and I think capcha is used on the sign-up form, but don't quote me on that.

[Rik]

It's a safe quote, Seb. In addition we have some 'check for human being' questions which have to be answered.

Can't comment on phpBB, Zim, but I believe Simon's forum used to have problems when they ran it

[Simon]

Yup, I'm afraid PhpBB 2.0 is your main problem, Zim, and I would suggest switching to SMF.  We used to run PC Pals on PhpBB 2.0, and it was a nightmare.  We were so over run by spam bots, it became a full time job dealing with them, and even with all manner of additional security and anti-spam mods on the go, we still had to use Admin Approval for all new registrations.  Moving to SMF made the problem virtually disappear over night.

[zappaDPJ]

As has already been said, admin approved registrations will stop it but then you have the problem of administrating new registrations which is a never ending task that needs to be done very frequently even if the forum is not that busy. You also have the issue of identifying genuine registrants especially on a gaming forum as many will use silly nicks like zappaDPJ  These are easily lost amongst the 1137viagraRus spam bots.

Having a strong captcha might help especially if custom fonts are used.

Another thing to try, if phpBB 2.0.10 supports it, is to have a question with an obvious (to new members) answer such as 'what is our clan name?'. Off the top of my head I don't recall if this facility is available though.

I switched all my forums away from phpBB to vBulletin because this does offer various options to help fight this menace although in its default installation it's just as vulnerable as phpBB. It also has to be paid for.

There has been a huge increase in forum spam bots in recent months due to the release of a very aggressive spam bot tool and some very lax registration systems on most of the free email facilities including gmail and hotmail. Some boards choose to ban free email accounts because of this but it's not a answer because many of your legitimate registrants may choose to use them.

[Glenn]

Upgrade to Version 3 of phpbb,  http://www.stopforumspam.com/ will aid you in finding known spam IP's, used with http://recaptcha.net/ and you prevent the majority of bots from registering.

[zimmerframe]

Thank you for the above advice all.  I'll pass this on.