Helpful Coder

I have a site hosted on one of my servers that has a phpBB installation. The admin for the board had basically walked away from the site. Anyone who's worked with phpBB, or any forum for that matter - knows that it's like crack cocaine for spammers - they love that crap. So while moving sites off this old server, I noticed it was still there. I logged in and HOLY SH^T it's the spamocalypse in there. I think just one of the sections had like 8k new posts. Of course, any legitimate users had no doubt been driven away. So I closed it down. But just before I did the rm -rf to dump the boards, I thought - perhaps there's something useful here? So I just put an htaccess password on it instead to keep the spammers out, as well as any SEO benefit they may get from google spidering all that crap. At the very least there's a wealth of IP addresses and email addresses used by spammers. And perhaps much more - after all many of the posts are basically the same thing over and...

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...

phpBB version 3.0 is now out . phpBB is one of the most popular bulletin board/forum systems out there, and is open source. I run a few forums on phpBB 2.x and I've always been happy with the ease of setting it up. My biggest complaint was a relative lack of tools built-in to help with spammers. Perhaps 3.0 will solve this! Of course, you can't convert over to 3.0 from 2.x yet, so I guess I'll be waiting a while before trying the new system.