MundayWeb.com

Hi all,

The forum has always had bogus accounts with links to various web sites. I have done my best to remove these accounts now and again.

However, this has become tedious so I have installed some nifty scripts to do it for me.

If your account has been deleted, then it's because it was marked as inactive and you're probably not reading this anyhow!

Neil.

I had the same problem with bogus users and spam messages on our team phpBB.

I modified the phpBB code with some suggestions I found at phpBB but some of my own thawts.

So far this week I've had 0 bogus users and 0 spam.

Trick #1
Placed message on registration page to not enter a url and explained why, anyone entering a url is killed (bots mostly do this), I assume most humans can read. Real humans can enter a url after confirming thier account by editing thier profile. A minor inconvience. You need to leave the url on the form, as some bots can detect which are there. Just removing it will not get them all. I may end up doing the same for the signature field, requiring it to be blank at registration, but can be filled in later. Since those are the two they are most interested in leaving thier url links.

Trick#2
Mark all forums for registered users except a guest book. Any Guest (anonymous) is not allowed to use html or BBcode in thier post, text only, I even took the BBCode buttons off the page for guests. Any guest post with '[/url]' or 'href=' gets killed ie die();. Thus no spam since moslty all spam bots only leave links.

I'm sure a few might slip through as I've heard there are spammers that pay people to leave messages on boards.

At least for now I don't have to spend time every day deleteing posts and users.

Thanks for the info.

Only registered users can post in any of my forums. I'm quite impressed that the bots can get past the random number images.

Cheers,

Neil.

You shouldn't be impressed: http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/ His system can solve phpBB captchas with 97% accuracy. His source isn't available, but if he could do it, maybe someone else did it too.

I read somewhere that there are some sort of systems where people solve captchas in exchange for free porn or other things. Something like Stardust@Home but with bad intentions and with something in exchange

Good point. Did some hunting and realised apparently it's not that hard.

D'oh!

Neil.

Hi again,

I have added some code to the registration page to combat the bots. New users must not enter a URL in the website field or their registration will be halted.

They can however, enter one in their profile once they have registered.

Hopefully this will reduce some of the spam.

Cheers,

Neil.

Hi,

I have added some more modifications to the forum to combat the spam bots.

The new mods shouldn't affect normal users.

Please let me know if you experience any difficulties accessing the forums.

Cheers,

Neil.