We have a serious spammer on this board
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- Jedi Knight
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We have a serious spammer on this board
Somebody is constantly reregistering and spamming this board. An IP ban may be necessary.
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- Site Admin
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- Bridge Officer
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Actually, this is quite common for phpBB boards (trust me, I used to run one), and it's not a "human enemy". There are spam bots which are programmed to find live active phpBB boards, that are capable to bypassing the confirmation code, register, and then post in random forums. This happened multiple times a day, every day, for many months at a time at many boards I know. The solution is actually quite simple: turn on the user activation email thing (the thing that, when a user registers an account, will send an email to them asking them to activate their account so that they can post). If you do this, 99% of the spam bots will be unable to post. This is really the only way to fix this. The spam bots themselves have random rotating IP addresses, rotating email address domains, etc, and you can't really block them or stop them from coming or registering at the board, but they aren't able to check email and activate their own account, so they will be unable to post at the board if you turn it on.
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- Site Admin
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We do have user activation e-mails set to on. The visual confirmation code is a relatively easy thing to bypass.Socar wrote:Actually, this is quite common for phpBB boards (trust me, I used to run one), and it's not a "human enemy". There are spam bots which are programmed to find live active phpBB boards, that are capable to bypassing the confirmation code, register, and then post in random forums. This happened multiple times a day, every day, for many months at a time at many boards I know. The solution is actually quite simple: turn on the user activation email thing (the thing that, when a user registers an account, will send an email to them asking them to activate their account so that they can post).
I double checked that after this latest batch.
I used the phrase "human enemy" based entirely on reasons that don't have a thing to do with phpBB registration security - although, as you mentioned, e-mail confirmation usually prevents most spambots.
This whole thing is not, at this point in time, anything to worry about, even if we do have some mysterious (or not-so-mysterious) "enemy" out to irritate us by posting spam on this board.
- 2046
- Starship Captain
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I get hundreds of new user requests per month from spambots trying to get on my old board. Back when it was just a few and they weren't going straight to my spam folder I noticed that some are actually pretty good efforts, but most are just obvious spam-type names.
I do not envy you the trouble of dealing with them.
Here is a link to a selection of artillery you can employ, if you haven't seen it already. (Wong was once a mod there, btw, so if he still posts there you might get assistance from an unusual source. ;) )
I do not envy you the trouble of dealing with them.
Here is a link to a selection of artillery you can employ, if you haven't seen it already. (Wong was once a mod there, btw, so if he still posts there you might get assistance from an unusual source. ;) )
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- Site Admin
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- Site Admin
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- Jedi Knight
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- AnonymousRedShirtEnsign
- Jedi Knight
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