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!

The forum was already installed, but it was locked for this user. Essentially, his privileges were not extensive enough to allow him to post a new thread to the forum and he was labeled an “inactive” user.

Once I signed in as administrator to the forum (twice!), I went down the left-hand column to User Admin/Permissions. At the new screen I clicked on “Find a username” to find his username. A pop-up window allowed me to enter his partial username to find the actual spelling of it. Inputting the correct spelling of his username into the Permissions form and clicking on Lookup User brought up this page:

User admin screen from phpBB forum for setting permissions.

From this screen I could change the user’s level from user to administrator, and for each forum I could change the moderator status from “Not Moderator” to “Is Moderator”. By clicking Submit the user would be able to do pretty much anything on the forums.

Unfortunately, this user still could not sign in. I reset his password and he still could not sign in with the new password, even though he refreshed his browser. The limiting point here was that he was still considered inactive. I thought that was because he never made any posts yet, but not so.

Going to the User Admin/Management page in the Admin area, I found a group of “Special admin-only fields” under which was listed the term “User is Active” and the No choice selected. Once I changed the No to a Yes, and submitted the changes, my user could sign in and make a post to the forum.