SPAM-Invasion

[Parabellum]

I call on the administrators to take immediate action against the spam activities of the last few days. I have made suggestions in the moderators' corner.
We don't want this forum to end up like JP's a few years ago!

[lvjtn]

you are right

what's your proposal? should we change the restriction of the registration?

now it's very easy to answer the confirmation question, it can be something harder to answer

i'm absolutely open minded to find a good way to keep this forum safe

[randowe]

Do all bots have the same general IP resp. are from the same country?

[lvjtn]

Do all bots have the same general IP resp. are from the same country?

not really, they are coming from china, russia and usa from various ip addresses

recently i deleted the new bots, changed the registration question and i'm learning how to use recaptcha for phpbb forum engine, but i can't promise when i can do this job, maybe this weekend

[Lettos]

what's your proposal? should we change the restriction of the registration?

now it's very easy to answer the confirmation question, it can be something harder to answer

Absolutely yes!

Perhaps supplement the Terms of use with some sort of rule about the content of the posts. There should be a legal basis for moderators to remove meaningless posts; posts containing advertisements in signatures, etc.

[LuisGuzman]

Do all bots have the same general IP resp. are from the same country?

not really, they are coming from china, russia and usa from various ip addresses

recently i deleted the new bots, changed the registration question and i'm learning how to use recaptcha for phpbb forum engine, but i can't promise when i can do this job, maybe this weekend

Thank you Csaba for looking to fix these mass attacks.

I've deleted around 100 users during January and February but spam bots are creating new users faster and faster every week.
I hope you can find a better method to avoid unwanted registering.
Anyway as I receive an email about new users requiring approval, I am rejecting any one having links to off-topic sites, or text not written in English.

But that is a time consuming task that would be great to avoid. Your help is very appreciated

[none]

Very late to the party, but having quite some experience (15 years+) administering a phpBB forum, I'd thought I'd share some info on forum spam fighting. You maybe know all of this, maybe not, I'll just put it here in case it helps.


What we had done in our forum back then was to make a totally impossible visual CAPTCHA (standard phpBB CAPTCHA with all settings pushed to 11), which probably ruined spammers' productivity while they were wasting hours trying to solve it...

Now legit people who were trying to register simply complained by email to the forum admin (which was me), and after receiving their email I simply registered them manually. Never underestimate the urge to complain of people with a clear conscience...
And yes, after I explained why we did this (standard email), all new members were very understanding. After all you register only once, and everybody hates spam.
Obviously this is only doable if you don't get more than 4-5 new members/week, else it becomes too time-consuming.

Now to my biggest surprise, some really superhuman spammers managed to solve our impossible CAPTCHA nevertheless, but they were few (couple/month).
For those, there is a very useful resource, StopForumSpam.com. It's a crowdsourced list of forum spammers worldwide, where you can check your new members' email addresses, names and IPs for previous suspicious activity, and also (very important!) report the spammers which appeared at your own forum (requires registering, you get a key with which you can then report spammers).

Using StopForumSpam.com I usually managed to delete 99% of spammers before they even managed to spam!...
The thing to know is that the people registering aren't the ones spamming: There are people (humans mostly) who register accounts, and then resell them in bulk to those who will use the account for their spam campaign (back then this was posting a huge blurb about some counterfeit ware site, with lots of links, then immediately send the Google bot to re-index the forum--as a result their site got a better page rank... Don't know what they're after nowadays, I've quit forum administrating some years ago).
Why did this work so well? Because, while legit users usually register to be able to ask their question or make a comment, spam accounts almost always lay dormant for a number of days before releasing their broadside of spam posts. During this period you can check them and disintegrate them!