thecoalman - 11:06 am on Sep 27, 2009 (gmt 0)

@ Truegho, for the bots you need to stop them at the door. That means an effective captcha system. As far as human spammers are concerned you need to make it unappealing for them. For example hiding profiles, memberlist, signatures or anywhere else they can get a link in that a bot might find.

For those of you using phpBB, the GD captcha in phpBB3 has worked quite well up until a few months ago. It is still somewhat effective as it can be adjusted but the harder you make it the harder it is for human to read. Slight adjustment on my own forum has shown to keep the bots at bay.

Captcha works, but I find using captcha that doesn't come with the application works better. If a bot was looking for a particular type of forum it expects a particular captcha system, swap it out for something different.

With the release of phpBB 3.0.6 which is currently in the RC phase you'll be able to do this out of the box as it will include a captcha plug-in system. It will be released with 3 winners of a competition they had including the popular Q&A captcha. You could of course create your own plug-in or download from other selections. The addition of this should prove to be quite effective against bots because you'll have numerous systems to choose from which can be updated independently of phpBB3.