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PunBB Forums → General discussion → too much spam! What can I do?
Hi,
every day, I wake up to 2 or 3 spam posts - it's a real pain to deal with and doesn't look good for our users.
Guest Visitors cannot post, only read.
However, these Spam posts are made by 'people/bots' that have registered an account.
I've set of the forum to required an email confirmation - so I'm impressed that a bot can do all of that.
Whatelse can I do to tackle this? Which plugin is best?
Thanks!
this *might* work, still. I'm not sure.
To prevent auto registers, the image verification mod on Punres might be a good choice.
ok, thanks I'll take a look at those..
Are you sure that these spams are coming from registered accounts and not guests?
I had the same problem and I really thought that spamers were registered users (the confusion is possible because in other forums, only registered users have a link on their name).
in fact, my porblem was coming from the fact that my punbb forum has been created by converting a phpbb one.
In that case, in the table users, the guest group_id was equal to 4 instead of 3.
Because of this little mistake, guest posting is active even if you have set your permissions to authorize members posting only.
I'm getting a daily influx of spam from bots registering an account and posting away. Email verification is turned on.
yeah, I've checked the guest settings - as I guest, I can't make a post. It's been worse than it ever was with phpbb 
I've now installed a image verification mod.. and for the moment, it seems to have helped - lets see...
Bad Behaviour is pretty easy to integrate into PunBB, and probably will become a plugin in 1.3 (if I have anything to say about it 
). I have some code for it sitting around somewhere, and that provides a decent level of protection.
don't flame me for the link but it's what we use on our vb based boards(soon to be converted to punbb 1.3) and it's working great:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=96018
just an idea since spam bots seem to pattern this behavior.
Dr. Jeckyl: How does the mod actually work .e.g does it throw up an error message if you try to post a link and prevent the post being entered?
Dr. Jeckyl: How does the mod actually work .e.g does it throw up an error message if you try to post a link and prevent the post being entered?
yes exactly. with spam bots being what they are don't process errors and can't move around them so they get stuck and move along.
I know someone who has used the method that Dr. Jeckly mentioned, and they had excellent results. However, we did occasionally have people ask why they couldn't post (legitimate) links.
I know someone who has used the method that Dr. Jeckly mentioned, and they had excellent results. However, we did occasionally have people ask why they couldn't post (legitimate) links.
i'm sure this will happen but with the vb mod i linked to you can adjust how many posts someone has to have before they can post links. in the mena time just tell them to not include the http or www.
Hmmm, I use this method. I am new to using PunBB, will folks here please comment on how effective this is or isn't? Thanks...
1) Guest Account set to read only, and then allowed on certain selected forums
2) A registering user becomes member of a group called "Validating" (taken from a suggestion elsewhere on these forums, I am sorry I do not remmeber who or where at the moment, but give credit where its due...)
3) Validating members can read only certain forums, maybe a bit more than guests, but have to wait for me to "process them", which includes making them a member of some other group that has apporpriate access.
Seems to work for us. I do not know if this is flawed excepting that if one does not wish to be manually activating /authenticating users. We are building our community pretty much by invitation, so for now this is okay.
Cheers,
TwoHawks
Love is the Function, No Form is the Tool
Twohawks -- thanks, that is a great idea which I am going to use. Today I woke up to yet another fake account and a post about animals (which I will leave to your imagination). As the board has little traffic, these posts are really prominent.
rdsuk... are you using it and is this the ticket?
BTW, I found this originally at http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=30806#p30806, "Protecting the forum from auto signups", a posting by dhdesign... he/she deserves the credit ;^)
egg... what was your solution?
Others... what did you think of this solution (flawed, okay, good, tight, other)?
Cheers,
PunBB Forums → General discussion → too much spam! What can I do?
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