Stopping email extracting bots?

Social Media
1

Has anyone found a good, free way of stopping email extracting bots from collecting email address’s from their forums please ?

Any help appreciated.

Dez.

2

I guess the best option is to use forum software which doesn’t reveal email addresses to unauthenticated users (and email harvesting bots)? Or even doesn’t reveal email addresses at all, and users communicate via forum PM system.

3

Thanks Alan, yep, that’s what’s wanted. Anyone know of any particular free ones to personally recommend ?

4

http://www.phpbb.com/ is a popular free open source forum system.

5

Yep, that’s also correct as well, but, has anyone found a good, free way of stopping email extracting bots from collecting email address’s from their forums please ?

6

This has already been answered - use a forum such as phpBB that does not expose the email addresses.

7

I asked, as it hadn’t been answered. Some bots still pick up the email address’s from forums, including phpbb forums.

8

Not sure how it was worked out, but yep, the bots scour the forums and get the email address’s. Would they be available through the profiles ?

9

Are you possibly referring to email addresses which have been posted in clear text by users, as opposed to users’ registered email addresses?

10

No.

11

Are you saying phpbb makes users’ registered email addresses available for everyone to view in plain text on, say, profile pages?

If not, I’m not sure how spambots could pick them up. It’s not like they can reach into your database and snatch the information from the ‘users’ table.

12

Maybe the fault lies with the template you’re using? i.e. exposing them in threads, index pages?

13

They shouldn’t be available anywhere. If they are, there’s a serious problem! Mittenteague may be onto something about the template. If you’re sure addresses are getting compromised, you may want to thumb through it manually and try to find out where.

14

ok, thanks for all the input. Will think this through a little more. Just thought there might have been a mod for the phpbb forums for this ?

15

I don’t know if this would be the same for phpBB3, but for phpBB2 you can (depending on what you want to not show) do something like

# 
#-----[ OPEN ]------------------------------------------ 
# 
viewtopic.php

# 
#-----[ FIND ]------------------------------------------ 
# 
	$template->assign_block_vars('postrow', array(

# 
#-----[ BEFORE, ADD ]------------------------------------
#
	if ($userdata['user_id'] == ANONYMOUS) //remove values
	{
		$email_img = "";
		$email = "";
		$www_img = "";
		$www = "";
		$icq_status_img = "";
		$icq_img = "";
		$icq = "";
		$aim_img = "";
		$aim = "";
		$msn_img = "";
		$msn = "";
		$yim_img = "";
		$yim = "";
	}

#
#-----[ SAVE/CLOSE ALL FILES ]------------------------------------------
#
16

Thanks Mittineague, and sorry for not coming back sooner. Looked everywhere in my viewtopic.php and that code is nowhere to be found ;-(

17

What I posted is in MOD format - the #-----[ FIND ] etc. are intstructions and not in the file. Or do you have phpBB3 ??