Forum bots

nano · Post by **nano** » Wed May 23, 2007 9:02 am

I wasn't quite sure where to post this, but you guys seem to be quite inundated with many forum spam bots and i thought i'd try to help out.

It appears you already have the optical word recognition implemented which is great and stops the advanced bots from signing up, but even the really low level bots can get through this in a simple way.

Go to admin_users.php and change the variable name for "agreed". Just do a find and replace with any name you wish. Since Phpbb2 is a free system, most bots know the variable names used and make scripts based on them.

Having a different variable name can prevent them from running their scripts successfully thus preventing them to register without passing through the registration screen (which is how they're getting past the visual recognition thing).

We've got some fairly big boards on our site and were really getting badly spammed until we put both of these things in, now we havent had a single one in months.

Saves the admins a whole lot of effort in deleting them all the time.

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Wed May 23, 2007 12:04 pm

Wow thank you, I'll try this when I get home tonight. Without access to the web logs there was no way to see this happening

Thanks again, I'll post an update here once I've done it, and we'll see how effective it is

edit: havent had chance to do this yet, i'll do it at the weekend

nano · Post by **nano** » Wed May 23, 2007 12:34 pm

Yeah no problem, being an admin myself know how annoying those damn things can be and just thought i'd try to help out instead of just leeching information off everyone

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Sat May 26, 2007 6:57 pm

okay i've just fixed this, I also decreased the catcha difficulty because I realised how hard it was to sign up! hopefully we'll see less spam from now on
thanks again

edit: didn't work

nano · Post by **nano** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 2:35 pm

If you still have bots, you must be really liked :p

If you really want to take it to a level they cant get through, you may want this also:

http://phpbb.mwegner.de/phpbb2/mods/ant ... index.html

=/ good luck!

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 3:59 pm

Right now the spam bots are not really a problem anymore. It's just one or two spams per day.