Fighting Forum Spam

[SRTech]

I have a phpBB forum that is getting quite a bit of forum spam recently. Do you guys get alot of spam, and how are you dealing with it?

I should note that some unique issues with my board, in that you have to be registered to post, but don't have to confirm your email. I did this because the board is small & new, and most of our target audience has trouble enough registering. I do have the visual confirmation enabled, but that does not seem to help.

Also, due to the fact that you don't have to confirm you email, most of the addresses bounce back to me when the welcome letter is sent, so I can't do what Chris did (http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3519), or report them to the email provider.

Thanks for your suggestions :)

[Chris]

Email confirmation is a must. It sucks that some people can't seem to figure it out, but what you can do is give them help. In my recent article on vbulletin optimization I link to a hack that providers encouragement for users in all stage of the registration process. This increased my subscription rates by practically 100%.

[Sagewing]

I agree, you have to confirm emails. There is also a script that can be installed to phpBB that will help prune bogus users. I use this on a few of my forums and, while it doesnt stop the problem, it helps contain the situation.

[CreationNation]

Tripled, definitely require confirmation. Also, even with confirmation, you will still get those knucklehead .info spammers coming to your board. Simply watch for them, delete their posts after you ban them, then look at what domain name they used to register from. Add that domain to your list (I use Vbulletin, not sure if PHPBB has the same) of banned email addresses that users cannot use to register from.

It's an ongoing battle with forum spam, but, that's part of the price of running forums on the Internet :) .

[FPU]

We tried approving all members and all of that crap but there were too many hoops for them to jump through and we gave up!

[Cutter]

I haven't had any problem with it yet, thankfully. Blog spam is a different story..