phpBB3 Hit by Spam, Time for Action

August 15, 2009

Unfortunately, the silence of the spammers on the new phpBB3 forum was short-lived, very short-lived. It took only a couple days for the obnoxious posts to begin anew, once we updated from phpBB2 to phpBB3.

The newer version of this forum software has better capabilities for dealing with, deleting or banning, users based on their email address or IP. Deleting users and their posts started to take more time than I wanted, but I continued that for a couple weeks.

After signing-in to the admin panel, go back to the forum post that you want to delete and click on the poster’s username to bring up their profile. Click on the “Administrate User” link near the top, then scroll down on the next page to the Basic Tools section. Check the box to delete the user and use the spin box to select ‘delete posts’. Hit the submit button and verify your choice on the next page. Poof! That user is gone.

The trouble with that tactic is that every day someone will have to keep on deleting. Not the way I want to spend my time.

I also tried banning users based on IPs by going to the ‘Users and Groups’ tab from the Admin panel. Under user security, I entered many emails in the ban by email, and many IPs in the Ban by IP pages. The Stop Forum Spam site provides current lists of spammer emails and IPs. I simply copied these long lists into the appropriate places in the ban by email or ban by IP pages. Bulk banning worked a little better. Now I was seeing fewer registrations and fewer unwanted posts on the forum.

Still SPAM! Still not good enough. So, the big guns (finally?) settled the score.

Changing from self-registration to admin-approved user registration is the last resort. This means that anyone wanting to register to make a post on the forum would have to wait for the admin to manually approve their registration. I figured that I’d like to deal with something positive regarding the forum boards, like approving a real person’s registration, instead of spending time with the negative actions of banning and deleting the obnoxious users, but since I didn’t want that much hands on I tried to vary the registration settings first. Here’s what to do….

Go to the General tab of the admin panel. Click on ‘user registration settings’ and “enable visual confirmation for registrations”, which means that new users would have to enter a random code that matches an image before they could register. This helps to prevent mass registrations by spammers.

Then go to ‘visual confirmation settings’ and select GD CAPTCHA, no foreground noise, background noise-x and -y set at 15, and add 3D noise objects. These settings have prevented new registrations to the forum for about a week on now. Wish us luck!

Let us know how your forum is dealing with the spammers!

Posted in Spam Killing Secrets, Time Management, Webmastering