Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

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TwistedWeather
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Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by TwistedWeather »

Will phpbb 3 have anything to help prevent things like that from happening? I have noticed a rash of these spammers poping up lately across the board at a ton of forums i visit?

I am hoping that this release will have something for board owners to help prevent these spammers from registering.

ElbertF
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by ElbertF »

It's probably someone that registered manually, not much you can do about it but ban the user and delete it's posts. Visual confirmation will prevent most automatic registrations and posts.

TwistedWeather
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by TwistedWeather »

spambot wrote: It's probably someone that registered manually, not much you can do about it but ban the user and delete it's posts. Visual confirmation will prevent most automatic registrations and posts.
I am not so sure about that. The one forum i help moderate at does have the visual confirmation but still alot of them slip thru. the majority of them ( As is normal i suppose ) never post. They just have links in their profiles to some spam. But still there is a good amount who do post things such as what was posted here to never return.
I think we are dealing with a new breed of spam bots or whatever they are called that can somehow bypass the visual confirmation.

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th23
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by th23 »

But then I think your current board isn't running phpBB 3 CVS. As I've some boards within the 2.x range as well there the mentioned happens even if visual confirmation is enabled. With my CVS test boards nothing like that is happening, so I think these spam posts here are entered manually as this board get more and more attraction right now...

Sad, but - i think - we have to live with it...

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Grok
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by Grok »

Yep. And some will make automated posts using key words from existing posts. At first I was deleting them but they would come right back. Now I just change their password so that they can't log in. It seems to be working for now but its just a matter of time before they catch on to using random usernames.

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Eelke
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by Eelke »

Of course it will depend on your particular situation, but in my case it is often quite easy to spot some spam registration from "genuine" ones. My board is primarily visited by Dutch people, with a specific interest, and if a registration comes along with a russian email address and a "homepage" that reads something like http://www.casinos.ru" target="_blank (the specific interest I mentioned before has nothing to do with casinos ;)), it's pretty obvious to me it's not a genuine user and I delete these registrations on sight.
In such cases, even a simple email for every new registration would be very helpful (I don't know what Olympus offers in that respect - in 2.0.x I could go for admin activation, but in that case you loose automatic email confirmation, plus I really wouldn't like genuine users having to wait for me to activate their account).

ElbertF
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by ElbertF »

TwistedWeather wrote: I am not so sure about that. The one forum i help moderate at does have the visual confirmation but still alot of them slip thru. the majority of them ( As is normal i suppose ) never post. They just have links in their profiles to some spam. But still there is a good amount who do post things such as what was posted here to never return.
I think we are dealing with a new breed of spam bots or whatever they are called that can somehow bypass the visual confirmation.
The 2.0.x CAPTCHA has been cracked, a new and better one is in the making.
spambot wrote: Visual confirmation will prevent most automatic registrations and posts.
One thing that could be done is making a spam filter, like the ones used for e-mail. Or perhaps a mod that requires the first couple of posts by a user to be validated. Users on my board don't a have acces to every forum by default, in stead I put them in a special group with more permissions after they posted some quality messages.

spellinn
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Re: Seeing that spam topic brings up a question?

Post by spellinn »

I posted a request on the main PHP forumsabout this exact topic.

The reason spammers target phpBB (and other forums) is to get their URLs onto as many website as possible, thus increasing their Google pagerank. One weakness in phpBB 2.x that encourages this behaviour is that inactive users (and their website URLs) still appear on the members list, thus allowing the spammer to get their link into your forum without having to activate their account. The members list gets trawled by google and bingo - the spammers ranking has increased without ever having to activate an account on your forum.

This behaviour should be disabled by default, so the spammer will have to activate their account (thus providing a valid email address for those forums who use email activation ie most) to get onto the members list, and thus get their URL onto your forum. I think this one change alone would reduce 90% of the spam signups.

Cheers,

Neil

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