How preventing SPAM on forums?

You guessed it "if you built it they will come"

[henry0]

I was smiling while typing my meta description but I really am not in the mood!

I start getting medication spam (well, medications now but I know the rest should soon knock at the door) on a site products support board

I am now playing with banning IPs and emails
However it is like a band-aid on a wooden leg

Any prevention method (phpBB2 forum)

Thanks to share your experience

Regards

Henry

[henry0]

I have a partial idea:
I can transform via XL, CSV my email anti spam list in a SQL doc and inject it in the forum banned emails list

Now I do not have an IP listing of banned IP

Has anyone ever published such a “one size fits all” banned IP list of well know IP spammers?

[trillianjedi]

Hi Henry,

Better that we move this thread over to the forum forum.

1. Go members only.

2. phpBB2 is very easy to modify. Here's an idea for you : edit viewtopic.php so that the "MakeClickable" function in functions.php is not called on any post by a member with, say, less than 10 posts.

3. Use your word ban list on URL's frequently spamming you. The combination of that and #2 above will at least make life very tricky for them.

4. This might surprise you, but write to the spammer. I've had excellent success doing that. Generally you get a "LOL, ok no problem" response and that will be that.

TJ

[henry0]

Hello TJ
good ideas here
I never noticed a "forum" forum :)

thanks

[rogerd]

Glad you found your way over here, Henry0!

If the spam is automated (bot spam), be sure you are doing image verification on new registrations.

[henry0]

I was rushing to use use it almost out of the box
it's my fault, so time for modif has came..I guess!

Thanks

I forgot about the img auth indeed that should do fine for the bot orginated one

[Hanu]

Image auth is often referred to as captcha. I'm not being a smart*ss, I just thought that you might find more ready-made phpbb software by querying Google for that term. Captchas work well to prevent comment spam on my Drupal site. There are a couple of ways to crack captchas but none of them is easy to implement. Unless your forum pages have PR10, they are a pretty reliable spam prevention.