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phpbb and spam

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 3:42 pm
by s.dot
last several attempts i've made at running a phpbb forum on any of my sites, were taken down because of the extreme amount of spam.

the phpbb captcha either doesn't work, or there are publicly available scripts to "crack" the captcha.

there's always the approve members, but I don't want to do that.

how does this forum stop the bots from signing up and spamming?

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 3:51 pm
by feyd
There are three barriers to entry, two visible, one not. The two visible are the captcha and the anti-bot question. The hidden barrier is some server side checks that stop a lot of link spam: if the website, among most of the other "default" fields is submitted, the IP address is banned.

We get the occasional spammer, but most users don't see it because we take care of it quickly and do checks frequently to see if we need to tweak the ban list further. There are a LOT of email addresses banned that we've added over the years which dropped the spam down a ton. The major part is due diligence in going beyond the "ban user" or "ban IP," but investigating further when possible to see patterns the computers just aren't going to note (because we don't ask them to.)

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 4:01 pm
by s.dot
feyd wrote:There are three barriers to entry, two visible, one not. The two visible are the captcha and the anti-bot question. The hidden barrier is some server side checks that stop a lot of link spam: if the website, among most of the other "default" fields is submitted, the IP address is banned.
Is this built in phpbb behavior, or stuff you guys added?

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 7:14 pm
by feyd
Anti-bot question is a mod from the community, the hidden is our own creation. There may be a variant available in the community, I don't know for sure.

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 11:40 pm
by s.dot
I'm assuming you mean the Textual Confirmation mod.. which I installed. It seems pretty sweet! If bots get past it.. i can just change the questions. ;)