SPAM - And How I remove it....

[Trazan]

Hi!

I have been cleaning out all Spam-posts from this Forum for the latest months, beeing daily work sadly.

I am not able to delete users, beeing a total of soon 400 now, with 90% Spammers registred. Sadly.

I hope all these posts by spammers wont scare you off - Happy posting and discuss the old 8bit breadbin of our.

Happy Holidays.

[Gambit]

I run a few boards, one with thousands of visitors and hundreds of posts a day, I can provide information on how I deal with it.

I use a different forum software, but I think this forum allows add-ons so you should be able to do this.

The best thing you can get is an add-on that prevents new users from posting links or images. For example, I dont allow users with less than 10 posts from posting links or images. Since all spam posts contain links or images, it automatically stops 99% of spam.

Another thing is a No-Follow add-on. It adds rel=nofollow tags to all links. It wont stop spammers directly, but prevents any PR transfer.

Sure it may take you some time to find, download, setup, and install add-ons for your forum, but think of all the time you will save later.

When cleaning out your userlist, look for things that are the same. Since spammers use some sort of automation there will be things that are always the same. For example, lately I have noticed a bunch of spammers on my board, all with the birthdate of March 28th 1983, so all users with that birthday and 0 posts were deleted.

Hope that helps.

[Trazan]

Thank you for the info, this is something that Admin have to deal with when around. Im not able to alter such configs myself.

[j1mt3hcop13rwr3nch]

I mod the dutchforce electronics forum. When we started to get hammered by spam we set up a "taskforce' of trusted members with permissions to delete spam posts and report the user to admin.

As "these" types of forums seem to have a brighter user base than (say) "let's discuss Brittany today.com" it does work quite well.

[administrator]

We are definately interested in antispam/flamer add ons but can not find any for phpBB. I don't know how much longer we will keep using it if the developers do not improve the situation.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[mjj4363]

I wish i could take all the spam in the world and drop a nuclear bomb on it! I run a mobile phone unlocking forum and the forum is only a few weeks old and it was like a spam attack, there was 21 fake accounts and they were linked to spam bots. A spam blocker can be bypassed.

Michael