Forum "sleepers"?

Heads up phpbb admins

[camweh]

I don't know why this caught my eye but there was something not right about a new member on my phpbb forum. I was expecting to see a website and a spammy signature when I checked him out but no. Everything else seemed above board and he'd used a gmail account to activate his membership.

Anyway long story short, did a google search using "newest registered user is gulassa". Damn if there wasn't pages of registrations by him over the last few days on phpbb forums. Why, any theories? Some kind of sleeper?

[Condor12]

Hi,

Spoke to my phpbb guy. It is a bot. The newer versions of phpbb have the graphic number requirement for users registering that will stop this.

Alan

[trillianjedi]

You should also "non-standardise" all your scripts. Change "login.php" to "mylogin.php", "signup.php" to "joinup.php" etc. Use mod_rewrite to change the way that the URL variables appear at the client-side.

Most bots work on the basis that popular forums all have the same processes and script names and it's therefore very easy to automate. Customising breaks 99% of these processes.

TJ

[rogerd]

Other tools like flood control, limits on new member posting, moderated first posts, etc. will also help avoid a mess if the "sleepers" get the order to awaken and start spamming.