phpBB Spammer Problem

My mods and I are having a major headache with our phpBB forums. I'm having to filter through literally an estimated couple hundred spam accounts a week if not more, as my site's been getting hammered by them for many months now. What sucks with my phpBB setup is that you HAVE to edit each account one by one - there's no way to delete multiple accounts at a time.

I have every available spam filtering option enabled too, including image confirmation. The spambots evidently have eyes now, so that's not doing much to keep them out. So I've been doing administrative approval, but we're getting rather tired of having dozens upon dozens of emails a day that are nothing but spam accounts.

Do any of you guys know any tricks? Is there any way I can tweak phpBB to do a better job of keeping these bots out?

Congratulations AK,

Your newest member is Hhoeupvh, and he is a spammer. He will attempt to spam pharmaceutical products ;)

I will give your request some thought and send you a PM. I don't want the little scroats finding out our countermeasures :lildevil:

I shall probably have to create an account to get a feel for the process. I shall call it nihil123.

cheers :)

Don't allow posting to any forums without logging on and require image verification for each logon...went a long way towards removing the problem on our clan forums...both are natively supported in phpBB.

/neb

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Don't allow posting to any forums without logging on and require image verification for each logon...

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Yep, got those set already.

Saw you pop in Nihil. Want admin privileges to look around? I've already got Foxy as an admin. You can never have too many Brits. :D

Sure AK,

That would be a good idea as I can check out the internal processes. OK I know the general principles, but I don't have any hands on experience of phpBB.

Cheers :)

What version of phpbb is it? If it isnt 2.0.22 you should upgrade..

It is 2.0.22.

I'll set you up with admin Nihil -- Just fyi, all admins get emails for new accounts, which means tons of emails due to the spambots, so might want to tweak junk filter accordingly to keep those out of your inbox.

Check out the introduction forum while you're poking around in there. ;)

OK AK, that's fine. I want to look at then to analyse patterns. This spambotting is something I have watched grow since we updated the site, and I have been studying it for some time now and JPNyc and I discuss trends and developments quite regularly.

I look forward to looking around and hope that I can help. Hopefully we can help each other as I will get more samples to examine.:D

Cheers,

Johnno

I was able to solve this same problem by changing the color of the text in the CAPTCHA verification. Unfortunately, I can't find the link to the post I used to fix it. I did however, find a link what looks like a similar solution. You might want to give it a try:
http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com...es_and_shadows

install "Textual Confirmation" by bbantispam. No spam bot will ever register again.

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.

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..

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. :mad:

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 :p, 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 :eek:

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 :(