What do you use for membership account activation? None, User or Admin.
I use Admin. I've been getting a ton of spammers trying to register, so I feel safer activating the accounts myself after I've had a chance to review their info. You can always tell a spammer from a legitimate member.
None and i have put it to user validation sometimes when then has been a few idiots around.
linnysue, I recommend either adding an anti spam mod ( See here) or updating to phpBB3 as there is no spam yet at all and if there is any you can tweak the captcha to make it harder, set a minimum time the registration page has to be open before it can be submitted (bots submit the form much faster then humans can so if they submit it before that time has passed it will reject the registration and if that all fails you can make a few custom profile fields for the registration page which will confuse them. If all that fails you can add an anti spam mod such as another captcha or a question mod like what i have installed here where you can set a question in the acp and 2 possible answers and it shows on the registration page. This is much easier then reading captcha i find any hence why added it here as i have a problem reading the phpBB3 catpcha sometimes so working out what 2+2 is is much easier the writing a string of 6-8 letters that you can barely read.
Fowler, this is great info. Thank you.
I am leaning heavily towards phpbb3, so I may make the switch soon. Our forum has suffered some recent downtime on several occasions so I'm waiting for things to settle for awhile before I make any new changes.
I do have a question about bots. If you block spam bots what about the other bots you do want like google bots, yahoo bots, etc.? How does that work if you don't want to eliminate bots altogether? I have adsense, so I do want the google bots.
It doesn't block spam bots from your site. They can still view everything but they just get buggered when it comes to the registration page. The google and yahoo bots will not be affected as they will not be trying to submit the registration forum like spam bots do and the custom profile fields or the antispam mods will not affect them either. In the end it is only the registration page that is affected so the spam bots will still visit and try to registered and will scan all the posts looking for emails and links to spam. Yahoo and Google will crawl the whole site treating it no differently to any other forum.
That would be a nice Christmas present, but I will wait at least until the new year to upgrade. Don't want to take away from precious family time. I spend too much time on the 'net as it is!
Erm... Don't know what you are reading but according to the bug tracker there are 6 pages and again not all are actual bugs as some are support issues or duplicates. Not every bug has to be fixed as only show stopping bugs will stop it going Gold from what i have heard...
The only tool I use for account activation is tha the registering member has to do a simple math equation. I used an anti-spammer list I got off of Nuts 'N' Bolts that is pretty effective. They compiled a list of 1,500 known spammers and since I opened I have had zero spammers using the list.
At the moment I have it on Admin activation. I would prefer none, but as someone who's not welcome on the forum keeps trying to make herself accounts I've choosen that option for the time being.
