Fighting a losing battle against spam…

 

My forum is still being hammered by spam on a daily basis. I’ve added an assortment of phpBB Mods in an attempt to reduce them, but as yet I’ve had limited success. What I really need is a version of Spam Karma 2, which I use for WordPress, that works with phpBB. I’m getting more than a little fed up of waking up to see loads of adverts for porn, prescription drugs and gambling sites. I’ve toyed with the idea of changing the URL, and even shutting it down for a while.

Very annoying 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

3 thoughts on “Fighting a losing battle against spam…”

  1. Hi Tim,

    Spam is a disease, and “annoying” is a very mild description of how I feel about it. Lately, on my blog, I had to turn comment login on just to stop the deluge of daily spam, hundreds of comments and trackback spam *a day*, hammering the blog’s MySQL database. Even though Spam Karma (SK) is very good at catching most of them, a few legitimate ones do fall through the cracks.

    I did receive a message from Dave, the creator of SK, in which he wrote:

    If Sk2 catches legit comments too often, it may be a bug or a misconfiguration. The former can be improved by upgrading to the beta, the latter can be fixed by a look at your admin screen:
    http://www.wp-plugins.net/wiki/index.php?title=What_should_I_do_if_SK2_eats_a_legit_comment%3F

    Good luck to all of us with our fight against spam.

  2. Presumably only members of your forum can post messages there? And, equally presumptiously, you don’t allow people to sign up for membership without them submitting an email address for verification & activation first?

    So is the problem that you’ve got people signing up & getting authenticated who yet then take to spamming?

    If so, can you not ban registrations that use yahoo.com or hotmail.com as email domains (or whichever email domains seem to be causing the bulk of the problem)? Can you not implement captcha on the initial registration?

    And although I realise it’s a blog thing not a forum thing, but since Eddie mentioned it: trackback is evil and should just be switched off in my opinion! There’s also an option for WordPress (as I recall) to mark blog posts which are older than X days to be locked from further comments, which I certainly found helpful. Knowing that posts from a year ago aren’t having casino ads added to them was definitely re-assuring!

  3. Well, since installation of my blog on my website, I have also fought the endless battle of trying to reduce or even prevent the posting of porn on my website blog.

    For months I blocked IP addresses, but that was useless, as so many porn spammers use proxy addresses, and there are approximately 4000 additional IPs available daily.

    Finally, I just looked on the bright side, and consider the spam as traffic site hits. And since my WordPress blog is setup so for approval of all comments before they are posted, it is not very time consuming to scroll down the page of pending comments, mark all as spam, and delete.

    Website gets increased unique traffic daily, and only 5 minutes to maintain.

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