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(L) [2012/03/15] [ost by jbikker] [Spam] Wayback!

The amount of spam this forum receives is quickly growing. Also, we had 499 users yesterday, of which 440 never made a single post (or rather: none that got approved). So yesterday I took the liberty to delete all users with zero posts. Clearly, this is risky: perhaps I deleted users that were simply lurking. It did get rid of the 25 birthdays on the frontpage... Also, I noticed that a lot of users registered from the same IP address. I blocked 4 IP addresses, to reduce future flood.

A backup of the forum has been made yesterday, before the purge. Let me know if you want the copy (to prevent a future total black-out and total data loss like we had before).

- Jacco.

(L) [2012/03/15] [ost by zsolnai] [Spam] Wayback!

Thank you. I don't have any posts here (only at the old ompf forum), therefore I hope you don't mind this one to avoid any future deletion. [SMILEY :)]

(L) [2012/03/15] [ost by Arite] [Spam] Wayback!

Can I suggest a couple of changes to registration which might reduce spam:
Change the CAPTCHA from the default to reCAPTCHA (need to register domain with google, but then should work fine - it's been built into phpBB for a while).
Add in a custom profile field for registration - for more info see here:
[LINK http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom-profile-fields-as-an-anti-spammer-tool/]
Could be something really obvious like "1+1=", or something more involved. Basically it should put off automated registration scripts and the like.
Finally, something I haven't tried but has been shown to work well is the ModSecurity web application firewall. It's an Apache module (not phpBB mod).

Cheers, Arite.

(L) [2012/03/16] [ost by jbikker] [Spam] Wayback!

>> zsolnai wrote:Thank you. I don't have any posts here (only at the old ompf forum), therefore I hope you don't mind this one to avoid any future deletion.
No problem. [SMILEY :)] Sorry for deleting you!

(L) [2012/03/16] [ost by admin] [Spam] Wayback!

>> Arite wrote:Can I suggest a couple of changes to registration which might reduce spam:
Change the CAPTCHA from the default to reCAPTCHA (need to register domain with google, but then should work fine - it's been built into phpBB for a while).
Add in a custom profile field for registration - for more info see here:
[LINK http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom-profile-fields-as-an-anti-spammer-tool/]
Could be something really obvious like "1+1=", or something more involved. Basically it should put off automated registration scripts and the like.
Finally, something I haven't tried but has been shown to work well is the ModSecurity web application firewall. It's an Apache module (not phpBB mod).

Cheers, Arite.
Thanks a lot for your suggestions! I'm not a phpBB expert et al., so this is highly appreciated. reCAPTCHA has been enabled now. I'll check the custom profile field later.

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