FED UP

It is tricky. You can read through this - www.stopforumspam.com - to get an idea of the extent of the problem. It is similar to the email spam that arrives.

Over time I chipped away at my old forum and got them down to about 30 per day automatically excluded but 3 per day that I needed to look at. I've just loaded the latest forum software and it has started again. It is a game - you put in anti spam measures - then they try to get round it. Much of it is caused by robots who try to register then either add a signature or try to post with dodgy links.

I think those on here are boys from India who earn a few piastres for posting links on the internet.

Peter


Peter

True ... there are two distinct varieties - the sad "earn money whilst surfing the net" prats (often from India and thereabouts) who only want to post links and earn a few pennies and the big boys. These big boys are the people programming the spambots who try to post links on forums and usually need to register first. They now usually manage to read graphics via OCR and Catchpas are increasingly less effective. reCaptcha - www.google.com/recaptcha - was reckoned to be 100% effective, but was solved by the robots early this year. It has since improved and is still partially effective.

I used to have a red panel that said "if you are a human, ignore the boxes below, key submit and fill them in later. This is an anti spambot procedure" - the boxes below were profile information. It was an approved mod for phpBB2 and worked on the basis that the spambots were programmed to look for the standard titles and enter an appropriate response. Registrations filling in those boxes were automatically deleted. It gradually became less effective.

More recently it became clear that spambots usually selected the first option on drop down boxes. This resulted in the time zone box on phpBB3 forums being set to "Baker Island (UTC-12)". This was an uninhabited stretch of Pacific so forums were modified to delete all registrations with that time zone. Now the spambots all key UTC +1 which is Western Europe !

Once a solution becomes well known the spam robots find a solution !

I've spent the last week experimenting with different solutions to stop this on my new forum. I'm now down to 1 dodgy registration in 24 hrs instead of 30.

Peter

Both.

Humans are much reduced by banning certain countries, IP's etc.

The few that do arrive are individually approved and experience makes this fairly straight forward.

Email me for details !

Peter

Some more since this post. The best solution is to stop them registering rather than deleting them after the event. Unfortunately I haven't worked with proboards, so don't know what tools are available.

I've eliminated the spam registrations on my new forum, but I guess they will get round the anti spam measures quite quickly.


Peter

Maybe they are travelling ?

Peter

Some of us are still here amongst the spam.

Yes but I really do wonder for how long. The membership list must be doing well though.

Trev..