GUYS! Fighting a losing battle here....

What's this about? Feeling particularly gassy tonight?

Bests, Rockefeller

Spam Bots, spamming.

Jen wrote:Spam Bots, spamming.

LoL, I figured...I just couldn't help myself

Bests, Rockefeller

what gets me is its in Spanish. Which isn't the language most of us type in. I think that's Spanish. I dunno, I'm not bilingual.

Well I know a bit of leet speak, but that's it.

Hi Jen,

There are some addons for phpBB forums that might be able to help. But I think in the end I upgraded phpBB to the latest version which has a bit better more support and mods for beating spam. Had a forum I ran awhile back that was getting spammed and upgrading phpBB and adding a few addons has all but got rid of the spam (just the occassional shifty manual spammer slips through, but the persistent spambots seemed to go away). I'll drop James a PM.

I done my best by deleting 100 or so tonight........lol I have PM james maye we could try not letting any posts threw unless approved. I think its too easy to register here.

plumgas wrote:I done my best by deleting 100 or so tonight........lol I have PM james maye we could try not letting any posts threw unless approved. I think its too easy to register here.

The forum addons I've used before helped a lot:

- One addon simply made it so new users with less than 5 posts or less than a day old can't post links or posts with common spam / advertising words.

- The other added a different type of unique CAPTCHA at registration to the typical ones spambots are used to. Where there is a very easy quiz and people just need to drag the correct answer to the correct column (e.g. some super easy Tex Murphy question most would know or would be easy to Google).

Most spammers or spambots are hit and run or automated so either they don't want to hang around until they can post links or they don't care to look up answers to a quiz for a forum they have no interest actually participating in. Plus most basic spambots don't have the function to drag and drop answers. So it reduced spam from pages of it to almost nothing for me. Just the rare persistent manual spammer trying hard to blend in like a real user.

However it would require updating to PHPBB 3 so have PMed James. Theres another antispam I used for PHPBB 2 for awhile, based around Javascript, which helped but I guess it broke or something for me or more spambots found countermeasures, still it may work as an interim.

Bumping this incase it helps others to see whats going on.

yep, I am sure its not a human content. any idiot would have given up by now.

I was thinking before as I have registered at forums & had to state why I wanted to join & had to wait to get approved. One forum over here you had to post in 5 subjects before you can make a new thread. Previously we had them here not create a new thread only to post under an existing one.

I can't do anymore, have to leave it for james. I have noticed they have setup a few other names but have not posted with them, probably waiting to use them if the active ones are blocked.

If I had access to be able to swat them I would. We need more swatters

Yeah generic automated spambot drivel is understandably pretty hard to manually stem the flow of once they get their hooks in a forum Thanks for your and Jen's efforts in keeping it down though.

Wow, very quick work James - nicely done

I've gone in and scorched the earth, so things should be back to normal...for now. I'll look into adding some new anti-spam measures to the site to shore up our defenses a bit. Thanks for all your help, everyone!

Thanks James. Nice work!