HORRIFIC forum spam on my site, how do I stop it?

Corporal Joined: Sep 15, 2004 Posts: 50

Hey guys,

I took a break this summer and even went so far as to kinda disable my website by simply renaming the index.php file, I know not a very secure way to disable it.

But heres my delimma..

Prior to my taking a break this summer, I was recieving ALOT of forum spam in my forums, you know..the porn crap....buy our pills...viagra....increase your penis size etc.

From what I gather, there is a BOT out there that allows people to basicly spider for websites running phpbb, which is all of em running php nuke for the most part.

Well, im one of em, im runnin nuke v8.0, and as i stated, I thought I got hurt PRIOR to taking the break for 6 months this summer...

Well, boy was I wrong....when I came back...MY GOD, the forums got hit harder then a crack whores crack pipe !! There were littleraly THOUSANDS of posts in the forum ranging anywhere from porn, to pills to buy our purple underwear !!!

I mean God, cant these people seriously get a freekin life?

Well, needless to say, I basicly had to move all my forums to a sort of ARCHIVE forum thread, and then locked it...and created 2 new forums for new posts etc, basicly starting over again, but allowing me to some day go back in and save some of the posts in the archive that mean something to me being alot were posted by my best friend who died of a heart attack Surprised

( , and id like to keep them posts....Someday ill move em.

Anyway, I guess now that I basicly spammed YOUR forum with my delimma...I guess what I am asking is, how the hell do you stop these smacktards? I mean, I realize I only renamed the index.php file and not the link to the forums which is bascily the same to any nuke site other than the domain name in front of the link. Which I assume is how the spider works....scans domains for the existing forum link....then registers and posts crap till the cows come home.

So again, I currently have version 8.0 installed of nuke....what do I need to do to stop this blatant retardism ??

I GREATLY appreciate any and ALL feedback in regard to this ongoing issue..PLEASE HELP SOMEONE !!

And for the record,, I would seriously like to hunt these bastards down and rip out there fingernails with pliers !

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to a reply !

Site Admin Joined: Aug 17, 2003 Posts: 12373

1) Don't allow guest posting. 99% of the spammers just post anonymously, its efficient and requires very little work effort for the bots.

2) Disable registration through the forums. If you do enable it, make sure user activation is on through the phpBB forums configuration

3) Enable all the security codes and graphics confirmations

4) Try the latest 3rd party anti-spam code such as
http://www.bbantispam.com/

Lieutenant Joined: Sep 13, 2003 Posts: 295

I allow guests to post in my forum and I have not had a single case of spamming, since I installed Advanced Textual Confirmation or bbantispam
http://www.bbantispam.com/ . I installed it in June. When you install it put the installation code in config.php, as is the latest suggestion, because it should take care of spamming everywhere and even in news comments.

Corporal Joined: Oct 15, 2003 Posts: 58

Yes , at least 3 people here include me confirm that bbantispam is okey , nearly 100% protection.
Goodluck mate.

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 6:33 pm

i agree with everything above to cach some of the bots....i have had quite a few humans try to spam my forums but with a few moderators deleting them rapidly they give up fast.

Corporal Joined: Sep 15, 2004 Posts: 50

Ok, Ill check out your suggestions guys.

Thank you for the feedback!