Forum spam messages

[jinxdone]

I've noticed a couple of times theres spam getting through to the forum, like today there were some ads that were all over the place (luckily they got deleted pretty quickly though). I guess the EG forum has been picked up by some spambots from google or whereever they get their targets from..

Perhaps the forum admin could install a captcha (an effective one) or perhaps just a simple added "are you a human? - yes/no question" in the registration form to get rid of these?

ps. of the captcha alternatives I prefer reCaptcha myself, I think it has some phpBB specific code also for easier setup.

[TomXP411]

The forum does use a captcha on the registration page. My guess is that a human operator posed those messages, or at least logged in the first time.

The thing is, there's no spam system that's 100% effective that doesn't also turn off new users. I don't know about you, but if I had to go through a complex anti-spam process (captchas are bad enough; I have a hard time reading them, sometimes...) just to register for a forum, I wouldn't bother most of the time.

[Livin]

not sure if you can implement but maybe a 2 'new thread' limit for new users for the first week or so?

[Bitmonster]

Yes, currently SPAM-bots are flooding this forum and maybe I have to close the registration for some time, as I don't have the time to remove them every pair of hours.

I don't like reCaptcha, because it is sometimes even for a normal human quite hard (if not impossible) to get the right letters and it adds an external dependency to the forum (if the reCaptcha server is down, the registration is also down).

Hopefully phpBB 3.0.5 comes soon, as it should have a better SPAM-bot-prevention.

[Bartman]

Is there a quick way to delete the spam messages (and the user).
If I was faster than Bitmonster it is quite annoying to do a handful of clicks for every post.

[jinxdone]

Yep I know captcha is not perfect, and obiviously the one we have right now is not doing the job properly as somebody reads them either with advanced OCR in their bot or human read.. hopefully we can get something to help with that at some point.

The thing that annoys me about it is that if Bitmonster or Bartman is not visiting the forum for some reason or another we might have porn advertizement posts here for days..

[Bitmonster]

I have replaced the CAPTCHA with a textual question some days ago. It seems to block the spam bots quite well. But there might be some sleepers in the member list, that have managed to get an account before this change.