How Can I Get Rid of Spam on My phpBB Forum?

[seamate]

Hey pals,

I have tried every method known to me all to no avail in trying to combat spam registrations and postings on my phpBB forum. I have used the different captchas that can be used on the forum, even self-made questions and answers, but the bots beat this and post all sort of rubbish on my site. How can I handle the situation please?

 

[sirthomas]

Well if you tried self made questions, that means there is probably a human on the other end who is solving it and targeting your forum specifically. So if you make a post link restriction, maybe they will move on. Something like you need 15 posts to post a link.

 

[VinBed]

Do what sirthomas recommends - disable the ability to make links for 15-20 posts and keep on the self-made questions. There's also a way to prevent bots like xrumer from pressing the submit button, but it would require you to reprogram the form to have the post url within a called javascript file.

 

[Vaspar]

You can download another kind of forum and tryout them all, maybe the spambot are only configurated to phpbb forums....

 

[seamate]

Well if you tried self made questions, that means there is probably a human on the other end who is solving it and targeting your forum specifically. So if you make a post link restriction, maybe they will move on. Something like you need 15 posts to post a link.

Thanks for the suggestion. Most of the spam posts don't even contain links...They are mainly long essays copied from somewhere on the net with many errors, and sometimes unreadable. In this light, implementing post count will not really do much to stop the spam. I need a working method. Any other suggestions?

 

[focks]

Yeah, when I changed from captchas to questions, I stopped getting the bots. Not sure how they are getting through.

 

[sirthomas]

Thanks for the suggestion. Most of the spam posts don't even contain links...They are mainly long essays copied from somewhere on the net with many errors, and sometimes unreadable. In this light, implementing post count will not really do much to stop the spam. I need a working method. Any other suggestions?

Are the IP addresses coming from some identifiable country? Maybe third world countries that you can block via their IP? Otherwise you can try multiple captchas and questions but that will take some extra coding.

 

[madsem]

Don't use image captchas... use css captchas in combination with rotating self-made questions that both have to be filled out, and moderators for the manual spam that still comes through
Or jquery drag & drop captcha... Both, css and jquery are extremely hard for bots.

 

[Typlo]

Maybe you can manually approve every registration in your forum. I have seen a few forums that doesn't allow free emails like gmail and yahoo to be used in registrations and i think that lessens the chance of letting in spammers. Then try to implement a rule that members should have a hundred postings before they can put up a signature.

 

[seamate]

Thanks all for your suggestions. I have done most of what you suggested at one time or the other, all to no avail. I spent a lot of time everyday trying to replace spam posts will valuable content since deleting the entire thread might result in a lot of broken links on my site which is not good for seo