Spam out of control can anyone help?

[Scarface]

I'm just wondering what MOD Forumpromotion or anyone else with phpbb uses? I cant seem to control spam bots no matter what i try.

 

[doitfuzz]

To make it more simple than simple, you can do it yourself by adding some lines of code in order to use stopforumspam IPs known spammer list (they are doing a really great job in compiling spammer ips, email, etc).

open includes/ucp/ucp_register.php and find this:

/**
* ucp_register
* Board registration
* @package ucp
*/

and just before those lines (line 18 ?) add this code:

$chk_user_ip = "$user->ip";

// Check if actual user IP is found in bannedips.csv
if (strpos(file_get_contents("/home/yourdir/bannedips.csv"),$chk_user_ip) !== false) {
	// Redirect spammer bot to index page or any custom page.
	header('Location: index.php');
	exit;
}

So it will look like this:

$chk_user_ip = "$user->ip";

// Check if actual user IP is found in bannedips.csv
if (strpos(file_get_contents("/home/yourdir/bannedips.csv"),$chk_user_ip) !== false) {
	// Redirect spammer bot to index page or any custom page.
	header('Location: index.php');
	exit;
}

/**
* ucp_register
* Board registration
* @package ucp
*/

This simple code will stop the spam bot registration attempts "before" the data are inserted into mysql and even before any filter, so this is a transparent filter which you do not have to worry about.

Don't forget to set the correct path to the banned ips file on your server. You might also want to set a daily crontab to automatically download the banned ips file from stopforumspam. They have multiple lists (bad IPs, Emails, Usernames) you can choose from. (I don't recommend to use the usernames file since it can leads to false positives).

http://www.stopforumspam.com/downloads/

The IPs file use in this code can be d/l here

http://www.stopforumspam.com/downloads/bannedips.zip

You can also customize this code to meet your standards :yes:

Hope this help.

 

[randomlinux]

There's also a couple of mods that use recaptcha, which tends to be pretty good. I haven't used it myself and it's beta, but it may be worth a shot.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1437345

 

[CyberFreak]

reCaptcha is available by default in phpBB3.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Perhaps you could add challenge questions to prevent spam bots? My forum used to be powered by phpBB and my co admin and I used a challenge question that was required when new members would join. That seemed to work for us.

 

[UnholyVision]

I use nuCaptcha on a few personal boards (none wide spread). The free package alone is great. One of my boards I am running on an older phpBB version (3.0.10) due to my own modifications & still have not got spam since I put it in the register portion of the forums.

http://www.nucaptcha.com/

 

[Dfarmer2001]

I guess you could just make some advertisements that you are hiring global mods and let real people help out with all the spamming. That might be a good thing to do if you don't have active mods already.

 

[Subz]

Recaptcha works very well, also blocking a lot of the banned ips and email addresses works very well too.

try these and let us know, it should stop the spammers but if not you may just need to be on the forum in the early hours just to delete spammy threads and ban the spam bots.

 

[Atrox]

There is a guide you can view here. 🙂