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#1 2006-04-29 04:02:25
- tamlyn
- Lead Developer
Dealing with forum spam
I've got the punbb spam checker mod installed and it worked great for about 6 months but recently a lot of spam has been getting through. Thanks to the efforts of the moderators it doesn't usually stick around for long but it's still a bit of a pain.
Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with it? Anyone know why the spam checker isn't working so well anymore? Should we disable guest posting to make it a bit harder for the spammers? Ted over at CMS Made Simple recently asked the same question and was answered with an overwhelming 'yes' (only two 'no' votes, one of which is mine).
I'm really not keen on forcing registration as it really pisses me off when you have to register at a forum just to post one simple question. Sure, if I want to become part of that community then I'll register (as so many people have done here) but I don't think I should be forced to register.
I'm also not keen on adding captcha cos it's annoying and it goes against a lot of the usable semantic web blah blah stuff which I believe in (or at least believe I should believe in).
Hmmm. Yeah ok, stop rambling, your turn...
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#2 2006-04-29 12:24:44
- pavian
- Moderator
Re: Dealing with forum spam
Well yeah Captcha is probably the only thing that works to make guests accounts more "save". I don't think however this goes aginst "the usable semantic web" - its a picture and you see letters which you copy in a textfield, how hard is that?
Maybe it is a solution to remove the PunBB-links and to use mod-rewrite in the forum? Also an exitpage and a link-sign would make this less interessting for spamers. I mean it like this:
Once you post a link its URL is save to the databse as link#997. The linked word inside the forum points to forum/link?go=997 which redirects you to the actual URL. The internal process is a little bit more complicated then...
The "link-sign" I am talking about is something similar to deviantart where all URLs are simply replaced by a text saying "[link]" - you can make this nice looking of course! Its mostly interessting for the spamers that it says ":-)" and this word actually points to a page.
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#3 2006-04-29 15:54:21
- hcgtv
- Member
Re: Dealing with forum spam
It's getting to the point where many forums are going to registration only posting. But even so, there's bots and people that register just to leave spam.
There is no silver bullett, at least I haven't found one.
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#4 2006-04-29 16:02:35
- pavian
- Moderator
Re: Dealing with forum spam
hcgtv is very right.
The only places I haven't seen to be auto-spammed are self-made-forums hehe.
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#5 2006-04-29 17:07:37
- tamlyn
- Lead Developer
Re: Dealing with forum spam
What if I changed all the post page variable names? That would confuse all the bots that don't scrape the html (which I think is probably most).
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#6 2007-08-21 02:17:56
- DC
- Administrator
Re: Dealing with forum spam
All interesting ideas but none foolproof but i can tell you this its getting very bad so although your against Turing type image protection it does help some what im posting here to get this discussion live again as this.
I feel is a very important topic you must all agree with me on the fact that a forum whose Spam is out of control just destroys the whole community this is our community not there's so we must take it back and do whatever it takes to stop them. I will not go into how here and i don't feel it should be discussed to in detail on an open forum as the spammers also read this but I did show some ideas to some of the mods here and feel some are good and worth thinking about.
Tam you say you have a mod in place not sure how it works or why it would stop working as PunBB is not a forum i have used but maybe you just need to update it write me separately if you like.
I like the id code idea as there's no link name to have engines index sounds like a plan anything to make it worthless to the spamer works for me.
DC
To code or not to code that is the question?
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