Hi guys/gals.

I'm just wonderin how you control spammers and bots from joing the forums and polluting threads with vigra adds and family incest webpage links??

Our local drag racing club has a small phpBB powered board and we get 20 some new users that are ALL bots and spammers.

We had the activation set for user control. (IE: just click the link to activate in your email) But that never worked...

Now we're down to admin authorization, but that's a disaster too because we're getting 20 some requests and day and you have to activate that user to look that their profile and figure if its a legit person, or some **** disturber...

My guess is that one of our users was infested with spyware and signed into the forums to see what was new, resulting in our website getting flagged...

I've been banning users and deleting their accounts, but they just keep coming

Besides changing our forum's adress... what else can we do?

 

we just ban 'em when they show up...

brains would know the end all answers though.

 

well, they have to have a legit email address and be able to confirm their registration. Then our moderators have fun spammer hunting and banning them.

 

We tried the activation emails, but its only 3pm here and I've alread had 8 'member' sign up... somehow they activate the accounts?

So besides banning them every 20 minutes, there's no way to prevent them from joining?

 

maybe phpBB is easier to spam?

 

phpBB is incredibly trivial to spam. Basically the only thing you can do is make sure you have the "captcha" image validation turned on... I'm pretty sure phpBB has it, and if not its about time they added it

 

Ohhh.. that's the image where you have to type the leters/numbers right?

I'll have a look right now in the admin controls!

 

I just had a look and under "general board settings" there is this option:

Enable Visual Confirmation
Requires users enter a code defined by an image when registering. * Yes No

It sounds like the same thing, but be damned if I know how they are getting past it. :S

 

I used to be a mod on a now defunct site that used phBB , Good Lord , what a spamming nightmare ! You were like a twig trying to hold back a river! I know VBulletin isn't exactly cheap but it is well worth the money!

 

They get past it with OCR. The phpBB captcha image is pretty easy for an OCR package to read, because they haven't done a good enough job obscuring the text. If you're up on your PHP coding, you can modify the source that creates the image to make it more complex.

 

Hmmm... I might have to suggest that Brain.

As I recall it was really easy to see, unlike some boards where you have to click "I can't read this chicken scratch!" to get another immage to play the DiVincy code on...

 

I don't have access to the board files or anything other than general admin... I'm just small patatos

Do you know where to read up on that sort of tweeking so I can pass it along to the head nacho?

 

I HATE that type out hte word stuff, for the same reason you say, its like some sort of rediculous code.

A's and H's look the same, etc. etc.

 

Unfortunately, that's what's required now days to keep out the automated spambots What's really messed up, is there's obviously MONEY in spamming -- some loser is clicking on those links and buying that crap!!! If they weren't, the spammers would GO AWAY.

Anyway -- here's a good article to pass along: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2005...t_captcha.html

 

Heh, I've been out of town. I love droppin' the hamma on the spamma!

I have even caught them as they're registering, sent 'em a PM (saw them "reading private messages"), and banned 'em. Just a game I like to play...

 

You're a bad, bad man Cam.

Thanks for the link Brain.

I talked to the site admin and his man Doug was tweeking the code and stuff the other day. Apperently there was a problem with auto-activating. Now even though i still get the email, each user is no longer added to the member list unless we click on the activate link. Earlier it was not doing this, so after a couple days they were all part of the names list.

Weird, because it only started getting bad just a month or so ago. Never had much prob before sept. And hardly ANY spammers joined before May.

At work someone left a copy of Popular Science *pushes up my horn rimmed glasses all Clark Kent like* and there was an artical called the internet is sick.
A company called Cylabs was making great progress in stopping spammers... untill one fought back.

He used thousands of computers with back doors to flood thier server, killing it.
Then he killed thier domain host.
And then he killed thier ISP!

They were still down at the time of publication :S
Probably being held for ransom.