MTM2.com

Hello everyone,

Sadly the situation with spambots has been getting worse and worse. While at first the security question has kept them at bay for the longest time it seems that they have finally defeated it.

As a result I had to limit the forum accessibility for a new user. While everything can be seen when you freshly register, you can only post in the newly registered forum. Located here: viewforum.php?f=35

You can go ahead and use that forum as normal. Once I see that you are a real user the restrictions will be lifted.

Thank you for understanding.

Tried clicking that and it said I am not authorized to view the form.

Try now.

works now

I have been fighting with phpbb for years to get them to address these issues but they just won't do it. I have another forum and it uses the captcha AND the question AND it renames the variables used for both. The good folks at phpbb refuse to implement any other measures. They claim the question is all you need.

Other things you can do.

* hide all forums from guests, forcing people to register just to see the forum

* deny access to all forums for newly registered users except the forum you allow them to post in (there is no need for regular members to see that forum unless they are masochistic or something, right Slayer?)

* create a Spam group. I don't know which version you're using here, but on v3.1.2 you can deny spammers access to everything. So once they are detected as spam, toss them into the spam group and forget them. They can't re-register with the same info and can't do anything with the login they have.

* to help detect spammers I made a page that shows the 100 most recent registrations and linked email and user name to stopforumspam.com and to google so checking was easy. Then I included a spammify button to instantly cast them into oblivion.

A trick I've used but phpbb won't do is to prevent posting urls until you have 2 or 5 posts. That stops plenty.

Well I guess Slayer is masochistic :p

I haven't thought about the spam group but I'll probably use that to complement the newly registered users group.

On our old FCW forums we used to just have extra fields on the registration. All the bots automatically fill all fields. Which was funny when they would fill out their character level as their age, and so on. But just have one or two fields described as "don't enter anything here if your human" would stop them because they would enter a value and the submit verification would kick it out.
It was a cheap trick but it worked, and last I saw, the FCW forums, though dead, still have no spam bots.

Not sure why you guys think I am a masochist. :-\