phpBB Spammer Problem

[JPnyc]

Get spammer's limbo for phpBB. Of course the BEST thing you could do about the spammer problem is to switch to vBulletin. There are many more plug-ins available for vBulletin to deal with spam.

You can put a serious dent in spam by blocking the following:
all e-mails ending with.info,.RU,.WS
block all IPs coming out of Russia (and all former Soviet republics), China, and India. Those three are responsible for 90% of forum spam. Russia is the clear leader, but the other two make up the remainder.

[oofki]

I think there is an option to only allow admins to activate an account too. You will still get registration requests but they wont make it on to the forum..

[nihil]

Hi oofki,

You are quite right that there is the Admin authorisation option. AK has it turned on.

Part of the problem seems to be that when someone registers, they appear in the Members List, even though their account isn't activated.

From my observations the problem is that phpBB lets you enter website, contact details and personal details before the account is activated.

It seems that in this situation the actual registration is the spam as you get the links to the pr0n and v.i.a.g.r.a sites, and there is no intention of actually posting.

The admins then have the hassle of deleting these spurious accounts.

[foxyloxley]

further to nihil's account
the spammer are allowed to set an account
ideally we should be able to stop certain sections of the registration form until they have been accepted, AND have posted

but downside is that without th espam additions to the registration form, we would have to accept them into the forum AND have them post their tat

on Taz, also a phpbb, we set a security question into the registration procedure, that requires input to the answer to allow the registration to complete

this has, so far , stopped damn nigh all spam accounts on Taz
AK's site is an easier one to control too, as he set it mainly for friends, who are local to him [USA] so we can add several address endings to the ban lists

but it does continue to be a PITA

one other in the phpbb v vbb issue
does anyone have experience of Web Wiz Forums ??
as I also admin one of those too at http://www.motorbike-search-engine.co.uk/forum/
and I don't know how, but we've had only ONE spam account since creation

and we don't know how we did it either