Spam

[jbikker]

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.

[zsolnai]

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.

[Arite]

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:
  http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom- ... mmer-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.

[jbikker]

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. Sorry for deleting you!

[admin]

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:
  http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom- ... mmer-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.

[larsb]

So I'll also post here to avoid being deleted again.

[Chris Morris]

saving myself as well

[guo]

OK. So I have to stop lurking to avoid being deleted again.

[dsavi]

Same here.

[stalker]

Another pointless post to prevent future deletion