The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Pretty frustrating.

I'll look into what sorts of anti-spam solutions are out there these days, although it's a pretty terrible arms race. Unfortunately, what I've found is the best approach to getting rid of forum spam is just making forums completely unsearchable via robots.txt exclusion and removing all inbound links to them from search engines and so on, and even then that just stops new spammers from showing up (usually).

Basically the Internet sucks and spammers are the worst scum of the earth. It's not like posting links here would even be useful. I guess spammers still haven't gotten the rel="nofollow" memo.

Ooh, I like the sounds of this one. It might be a bit of overkill though.

Can you make a post limit for new accounts?

The spam doesn't seem that bad (maybe I'm missing it?) just every once in a while a new account comes along and posts in every forum.

phpBB's built-in post rate throttling is pretty minimal and easy to get around, and only applies equally to all accounts.

fluffy wrote:phpBB's built-in post rate throttling is pretty minimal and easy to get around, and only applies equally to all accounts.

Is there any way to set it up to alert you (or someone) if there is a member whose post rate passes a certain threshhold? Then the moderator can check to see if there's a problem? If someone posts five times in five minutes, it's either a spambot or BLT, y'know?

Personally I'd like to see something that just does stuff automatically, rather than putting even more of a burden on the moderators and board admins, at least in the case of exceptionally clear-cut spam (which is what that particular mod seems to be designed to deal with). Obviously there will always be spammers who are real people who are just paid to look like actual community members who just happen to like promoting certain things inappropriately, and there's no automatic way to deal with that (aside from tracking their patterns and IP addresses which you then ban) but those are in the vast minority compared to fire-and-forget clusterbombs.

fluffy wrote:Personally I'd like to see something that just does stuff automatically, rather than putting even more of a burden on the moderators and board admins, at least in the case of exceptionally clear-cut spam (which is what that particular mod seems to be designed to deal with). Obviously there will always be spammers who are real people who are just paid to look like actual community members who just happen to like promoting certain things inappropriately, and there's no automatic way to deal with that (aside from tracking their patterns and IP addresses which you then ban) but those are in the vast minority compared to fire-and-forget clusterbombs.

Sure, the best option would be a customer filter. One that, for instance, limits you to five posts an hour until you hit 50 posts without getting banned. You said that no such option exists. Are there 3rd party plugins for PhpBB that might serve that purpose? And if so, what are the risks of trying one out?

Failing that, e-mail notification would be the next best option, I think. Followed (at some distance) by the status quo option of just banning each spambot as it appears.

I should clarify that no such option is built-in to phpBB. There are probably mods to allow that. But the mod I linked to is much more comprehensive than that anyway.

fluffy wrote:I should clarify that no such option is built-in to phpBB. There are probably mods to allow that. But the mod I linked to is much more comprehensive than that anyway.

Oh, I missed the link from before. Sorry about that. Carry on, then.

That mod looks like just what the doctor ordered... assuming it functions as advertised and doesn't break anything else.

What about one of those pain in the butt capcha things to register. Aren't those bot proof?

Also, you can make all but one of the forums here so that you need 50 posts before you can post. But have a new member section or a "spasm" section that you can post in right away.

Lol, I love the idea of a spam section. The only place they can post. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:Lol, I love the idea of a spam section.

1. Because it would be an entire forum dedicated to you.
2. Because you need a reliable place to buy v1agra.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:What about one of those pain in the butt capcha things to register. Aren't those bot proof?

Not even slightly.

Manhattan Glutton wrote:

Billy's Little Trip wrote:Lol, I love the idea of a spam section.

1. Because it would be an entire forum dedicated to you.
2. Because you need a reliable place to buy v1agra.

I don't spam, I troll.

And the only boner help I need is your mom.

Get a room, you two!

Billy's Little Trip wrote:

Manhattan Glutton wrote:

Billy's Little Trip wrote:Lol, I love the idea of a spam section.

1. Because it would be an entire forum dedicated to you.
2. Because you need a reliable place to buy v1agra.

I don't spam, I troll.

And the only boner help I need is your mom.

MG's mum has better cookies than your mum. And she gives me a bit of Spam if I shag her twice. Your mum only gives me a very poor generic spiced pork substitute. Which funnily enough, is what Jon Eric's missus calls me when I pop around.

Caravan "generic spiced pork substitute" Ray. A name as long as his old lady seeking missile.

I'm coming to realize that the spammers have nothing on you guys.

Wanna buy some golf clubs?

http://www.stopforumspam.com/contributions

Found this by accident - can we plug in the phpBB extension, get an API key to this site, and be done with this shit?

MG, there is no problem. Even if there were a problem, no solution would be 100% effective so we shouldn't bother doing anything. Also, you are an asshole for making a suggestion about it.

Furthermore, what about this?

http://docs.nucaptcha.com/plugins/phpbb

nucaptcha seems to still attack the spam problem at the time of registration, which isn't generally the problem with forum spam; from what I can see, usually it's done by a human registering an account that it just hands over to scripts.

The one MG linked to looks like it might be a nice balance between power and flexibility for us.