Membership site how-to

Where to go to learn how to create a membership site

[Barb]

I am not sure where to post this, but am looking for a website to go to to learn how to create a simple membership site.

Reason: Have a client that is running a psychic service site. The site and traffic is growing, and thusly, we are running into problems with bots taking over the phpbb board, troublemakers doing multiple registrations on our chat room, and more.

What I would probably do is take the logins from the chat room and upload those to the membership database so that our regulars won't have to re-register again. Many are AOL users who barely know how to copy/paste and asking them to register for something else will just confuse them more and we'll lose customers.

I've made the Staff Back Office by password protecting a folder and creating their logins manually - but naturally I can't do this for 500+ and growing people.

The Admin to another forum I'm a member of, a phpbb forum, said the only way he stopped bots was to put the phpbb behind a membership site.

I'm still learning as I go along here. I had a mentor, my neighbor, however, he passed away this past September so I don't have anyone to go to anymore to ask questions and kick ideas around to. I know I need to expand my knowledge base if I want to be more successful at web design/Admin.

So, if anyone can suggest a tutorial type site for how to create a membership site - I would be more than appreciative.

Thanks in advance,
Barbara

[draggar]

Use a captcha for the forums. I found a good one (when you register you have to select which pictures are of animals, it shows cars and kittens and will crop them differently). It's eliminated about 99.9% of the spam on my boards (from about 20-30 new "members" a day and 10-20 spam posts a day).

(Not a direct answer to your question, but one that will help).

[Barb]

Thanks for the answer.

The capcha that comes with the phpbb boards are ones that spam bots can read. So, if they can read the code to put in the right numbers and letters ... wouldn't they be able to do the same to select the correct image?

[draggar]

This captcha shows images of items, it comes wiht kittens and cars. You need to put a check next to pictures of animals.

The script also crops, resizes, and moves the pictures around.

I'll see if I can find the script again (or host it) so you can D/L it.

I don't know exactly why or how it works, but I've seen an almost complete reduction of spam and bots registering on the forums, I think the extremely few that got though are actual humans being paid by a company to do this.