Spam deluge

HyperReality · Spam deluge

As some of you may have noticed, there has been an increasing flood of spam posts on the forum in the last month or so.

Bill and I are doing our best to delete spam posts as soon as possible after they appear, and Craig is regularly deleting users who've participated in spamming of the forum, but I apologise in advance if any offensive or annoying material is left undeleted for any period of time.

Bill

further to the above:

Please do not click on any links in these spam messages and please do not reply or add comments. Thanks.

beardedwonder

Just wondering if the sign up page has one of those image boxes where you have to type the text that's in the image. Might stop all or at least some of the spam sign ups.

SciDoctor

Implementing the above should stop the bots.

Bill

HyperReality

I suspect that while some of it is from bots, some is from humans or human assisted (ever seen all those "earn lots of money for doing almost nothing" spam job ad emails? Maybe these people are working manually spamming forums), making it hard to counter.

As well as Bill's suggestions, I can think of some other things that might make it a bit harder for bot-spammers, such as requiring the search feature to be used a couple of times before you can post. As this would be non-standard behaviour for a phpBB forum, it would likely stop the bots.

However, making custom mods to the forum is a pain, and makes it harder to upgrade when necessary.

beardedwonder

a few forums ban people from starting new topics, but i don't think that would be such a good idea here.

Maybe there could be an introduce yourself forum, where you list your nebula installation and only after a moderator approves can you access the rest of the forum. At least this way the spam would most likely be limited to one forum.

Anyway, i'd like to say thanks to the mods for keeping this forum pretty spam free Very Happy

Craig Atkins

And I'd like to openly thank Bill and HyperReality for all their hard work.
I've not been about much recently and these guys have kept everything running like a dream.

Cheers guys! Very Happy

Anarchi

vBulletin has a "Report bad post to admin" feature, does phpBB have this option too?

This way if normal users see these posts, they can notify the mods so we can get rid of these threads/posts quicker

HyperReality

I'd prefer it if people just PM me (or Bill) about them, but only if a spam post isn't deleted by us within about 12 hours.

Having ongoing PM's and emails if a spam post isn't removed within 5 minutes of appearing will really be a drag on Bill and I in very short order.

Craig has made some changes to the account registration pages, so hopefully that will at least cut back the amount of spam.