Hey guys:
I have one forum that I keep open to non-registered users. It’s being harassed by black-hats submitting tons of links. What do you guys do to protect yourself from this? I suspect it may be an autoated bot…
Cheers!
Start blocking IP address. Also, find the user agents of that bot and block it through apache.
What forum software are you using?
Turn on image verification for registration if that’s an option…
It’s open for non-registered users, though.
Make them register, simple as that.
Oh, sorry, I didn’t catch that - netsolutions is right…there’s absolutely no way to stop this other than to require users to register - and use image verification. Even that isn’t guaranteed to stop them, you might even have to turn on email verification…but then you are making it harder and harder for visitors to register. I’d just require registration and image verification. I strongly recommend against letting guests posts, for this reason alone.
Hey:
I turned on registration to that forum. It’ll probably hurt the numbers of new postings, but it had to be done. Does anyone know of an image verification tool for PHPBB?
cheers,
It comes with it by default. I think you just need to turn it on.
phpBB? Look for a “Flood Control” MOD, another that’s changed names AFAIK, but it used to be the “No Open Proxies” MOD (it helped me immensely, but I have 0 SPAM tolerance on my own phpBB2 forum). As mentioned, every step you take to make things more difficult for the SPAM bots also makes it more inconvenient for your real visitors too. It’s something you need to weigh carefully. How much are you willing to tolerate how much SPAM vs. how much are you willing to risk losing real members? I think there may be a way to put everything into a moderation queue as well, but you would need an active staff of mods so as to not have a legitimate post sitting in limbo for long.