BB Getting Spammed

How to stop these people?

[ska_demon]

A friend has a phpBB type forum with a review section. You must be a registered user to post anywhere. Trouble is there is a handful of 'users' that seem to be constantly spamming the review section with bulk links to all manner of dodgy sites. It appears that blocking ip addresses and banning the users has no effect as they are back in and posting again in no time.

Any suggestions how he might be able to prevent this?

Or, does he keep deleting the posts til the spammers get bored?

TIA

Ska

[topr8]

is there not some way of preventing the posting of links?

[martinibuster]

Do you have the image test installed? With that installed, a bot can't register on the site and post threads (afaik).

Although you note that guests can't post, you may want to double check your permissions for each forum anyway, just to make sure.

[monkeythumpa]

Also you can use the word filter to kill the links, if you can find any patterns in them.

[2by4]

There are now solutions to that issue. But even if you don't implement those, you can do this:

Using the current phpbb setup, you need to implement aggressive modding. That's zero tolerance. One strike and your ip is banned permanently. Your email is banned. Spammers aren't nice guys. A forum spammer is not a valued member of your forum, it's not worth spending any time sending them stickies, just ban them.

Use the image registration, use email verification. I don't like email verification but if spam were to become a major problem, I'd instantly move to it. Very few spammers ever use real email addresses.

If you ban each email a spammer uses to signup, and their ip, and their user account, it forces them to switch to proxy servers, and to create a new email account, and a new user account, each time they want to create a link.

Zero tolerance is extremely affective, it cuts spam down to a trickle.

Other basic things you should do is block all pages that have user data on them, like www links, profile, members page, in robots.txt. On the registration form, tell the registrant you are doing this. Use big bold letters. That cuts down spam even more.

Remember, forum spammers are lazy, and they don't get paid very much per link, so it's not worth their time to work extra hard to add a single link that will get deleted within minutes of them putting it up.

All forums spammers are not real users, they are spammers. You should treat them and their postings exactly the same way you treat email spam in your inbox, delete it instantly.

Remember, forget being nice, these guys are just spammers, treat them like what they are. They deserve zero respect, and zero second chance. If you follow these steps your forum spamming will virtually cease to exist.

[JollyK]

I agree with implementing the image and email verifications. No, I don't much like it either, but I've had to do it on my phpBB out of self-defense.

In addition, I modded the code such that you do not show up in the member list at all unless you have at least one post, your website *never* shows up in the member list, and any post including several normal spam keywords (mostly gambling and drug related) results in an email to me so I can check it.

Plus I'm fairly aggressive with IP and email bans.

There's still spam, but not as much.

JK

[ska_demon]

Thanks folks, I have passed on all the info I have been given to the guy who owns the forum. It's up to him now to make sure he keeps the spammers under control.

Ska