Help Me Humpa

[Phree]

Hiya,

I know what you mean about spammers I recently helped a company that was suffering with a lot of spam on their phpbb forum. I added a heap of new mods to try and combat them. Although it hasn't stopped them, it's slowed them down. Couple of mods I added (comments copied from another site):

[Humpa]

Thanks a lot!

I suppose I should have simply looked for existing mods/hacks - but I tend to overlook the obvious and just write my own code.

I have mine setup so that it wont show members in the members list unless they have a post. That wasn't very helpful though, so I changed the registration to require admin approval - but that proved tedious. So I now have a custom page I wrote that lets me add or delete new users. I have a page that lists all the awaiting users along with all their data. I simply click Add or Delete.
If I click "Add", they are sent the authentication email automatically. If I click "Delete", then they are automatically added to my Sticky post and a new thread is also started with their details.

I'm liking it so far, but I'd like users to be able to authenticate themselves - so I think I'll look at those mods, and incorporate that into what I'm doing now.

[dacool25]

Sorry to bring up this dusty old topic, but what are you doing with those ip's? I've read a lot on ip banning and how you shouldn't do it because you could be blocking numerous people from an isp and such. So what are you doing with these? Just banning them from the phpbb admin page?

Oh and i heard about this mod a while ago, i hear its pretty good. It sounds like a great idea, but i'm not sure if its for everyone:

http://www.bbprotection.net/

[Humpa]

[Humpa]

In case anyone is following this, I figured I'd update my spam plight.

I have my script send me an email for every new registration attempt, and that was getting extremely old - and all that ended up happening was real users were punished because I would often go days without checking out the new list of people awaiting activation.

But I found a solution that is amazingly simple, and nearly 100% effective. It is actually quite humorous.

Here's what I now do ...

On the registration page, in the Profile Information section, I changed the "Website" field to now say this:
Website (leave this blank until I activate your account - only spammers fill this in, so I use this to determine if you are a real person):

And that's it!!!!
I changed my code to ONLY send me an email if someone registers AND leaves that field blank.
Spammers just "spray and pray", so they don't take the time to read that - so I get very few emails. Probably about half the time it is from a real person - and in the email I get, I see the email address they use, so that is usually enough of an indication for me to know whether I need to bother going to my activation list or not. And if I do go to my activation list, it is sorted by "blank" Website fields first - so I click "select all" and quickly glance at those new activation attempts and just "uncheck" any new activations that look letgit - then I click Submit which either activates or sends them to the spam list.

I now spend less than a minute a day weeding out spammers, and I'm not plagued by own script inundating me with emails.