mandville wrote:
Not all spam is s bot account. Some is human. If you would like to suggest a suitable anti spam measure that is 100% please let the team know.
I have, no response. But when you say 100% I'm assuming you're being a bit vicious anyways. I've installed 2 modules on my phpbb3 boards and a couple of posting.php code changes, and spam has stopped. My php coding probably isn't no where near on a level as the Joomla! devs, but maybe they work on just that and don't bother with forum stuff. Sometimes I wonder though when the forum's spam code has kicked in and changed tags to [spam], why not just delete the post at that point?
While telling everyone to report it is fine, it's a band aid approach to a more chronic problem. The forums are less useful and severely impacted. Some people, i'd guess (like me) leave these forums for weeks at a time or worse move on to other CMSes instead of dealing with porn, sports, and who knows what else!
Maybe the measures I've installed are already here, my forum has only 30k users and no where near the traffic. One of the mods though work regardless of whether it's a bot or a human, as long as they are listed as a known spammer IP. My Block logs grow by about 10,000 entries in a 24 hour period.
I'll list what I've done with my phpbb3 board:
1. I use the phpbb3s stock captcha with following params:
Foreground noise: no
Background noise x-axis: 40
Background noise y-axis: 5
Wave distortion: Yes
Add 3D-noise objects: Yes
Use different fonts: New Shapes
I've installed other captchas, People-sign, Sortables, etc, they seem to be okay, I just stuck to the default as it appears to work.
2. Installed "Advanced Block Mod"
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/ ... block_mod/Major impact, 1000s of blocked registration via RBL lists and fake localized option gets the bots. Humans coming from an IP on the RBLs are blocked.
3. Installed "Disallow links before x posts"
http://skripter.se/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=165Minor impact, just blocks use of url tag for users under 10 posts. Easily worked around of course.
4. Modifed posting.php so that users with post-count < 5 requires a captcha check before posting.
5. Force all newly registered user's post to have to be approved. Yes, this requires lots of moderation for an active forum, but is it any different from having to dump all the spam posts? At least this way the user base won't see it.
I'm also more then happy to volunteer to help out approving posts.

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