Helpful Coder

I need a break... oh well, in these times better to have too much work than none at all! Here's a handy link I stumbled on while moderating new users on a forum I admin - Stop Forum Spam is a site dedicated to ... well, you can probably guess. Anyways, specifically useful is this comma-separated list of IP addresses - you can never keep up with all the new IPs spammers are using, but this should help cut down on the number you have to deal with. The list is quite long, so you may need to paste it in segments into whatever web-based admin you're using, or convert to one entry per line, etc. Probably worth the effort though.

Well, on the most popular forum I run I've finally bitten the bullet and done to manual moderation of all new members. The damn spammers go through the captcha like it's nothing these days, and despite an ever-increasing banlist of IP ranges and email addresses, they keep coming. I'm using phpBB (not the new one) so my moderation tools are pretty limited. I'm sure that's there's modules and whatnot out there, but I figure since I'm likely going to be upgrading to the new version at some point, there's not much point in messing with that. Plus I have a fair amount of customization on the forum, and I'd rather not mess that up until needed. I think there's a few different things leading to this new storm of spammers. First, I think it's obvious that they've figured some way around captcha style "prove your human" tests. Or they're just hiring "sweat shop spammers" to do it manually, and training them to decode the ca...

I've got a couple forums I help run, and dealing with spammers is a recurring problem. They either want to get an account with a link their site in their profile, or they want to active post spam in the forums - or both. There's been a bit of an upsurge in the little bastards lately, apparently they're getting through the "image verification" systems more easily now - or they're just going the sweatshop route and having humans make the accounts. Either way, it's a pain. What I've taken to doing is setting the forums so that the users must be approved before their active. With phpBB I also had to modify the code so that the user list only shows active users - for some reason it showed inactive users by default before! So even if they'd never clicked the activation link, they'd still get the url in their profile on the forum's user list. So now, when I'm going through the list of new users to be moderated, I follow these steps: Check th...