phpBB Spam – How to Stop it
Expert Consultant website use to have a very popular forum, based on phpBB 3. Several months ago I had to stop the forum altogether and attempted to clean it from spam. It was such a tedious work, that I simply decided to clean the database directly, and kept only few random older messages. It was not a best way forward but it took so much time that I simply couldn’t afford. Moderators have “resigned” because of this as well.
Later the board was reopened and now trying to get into the same position it use to be several months ago. Just after few days of reopening spam was an issue again. I have even blocked all links, html codes, etc. – nothing worked. After checking logs I found that 99% of spam comes from two courtiers (no prejudice in this post – just bare stat logs) Moldova (1405 forum-only visitors in 10 days) and Ukraine (1196 forum-only visitors in 10 days). By forum-only I mean that visitor gets straight to the registration-confirmation-post and NEVER visits any other section of my website like articles or blog.
At first I was thinking about putting a country-based IP blocking, but later I thought that punishing my real visitors because of spammers would be unfair. After searching around and trying to find easy to implement method I came across short PHP program called Advanced Textual Confirmation (Google it up for the latest version). Installation was really easy, required adding one extra line of code in your phpBB based forum. The idea is simple, before allowing to post user is required to answer a general knowledge question (anything you can think of). Because forum is mostly chemical, I decided to put two very simple chemical questions. And you know, people, that was it! Bots are not designed to answer questions but people spamming boards could not be bothered (or don’t know the answers) because they have 1000 boards a day to spam. Simple, elegant and efficient solution. But, what is more important, questions could be easily changed. Therefore if some spammers learn the answers, I will replace the questions.
So there is a way for both: keeping board spam-free and also educating some young and curious spammers in simple chemistry.
Due to enormous number of SPAM comments originating from RUSSIA and UKRAINE comments are being switched off. They have tried to spam my board – they couldn’t, now they are trying to spam this blog. Sorry, I can’t let it happen.
Name’n’Shame: IP address 92.241.165.236 originates from Russia, 3 spams a minute
Related posts: