Technology PHPBB2: Anti-Spam Measures
PHPBB2: Anti-Spam Measures |
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| Written by Maureen Jane Tan | |
| Sunday, 23 April 2006 | |
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One of the worst enemies of the phpbb2 administrators are hackers and spammers. Hackers will only attack you when you are targeted by them. They can destroy your forum; get passwords from the forum users; etc. Spammers, however, do not choose anyone in particular. They just run bots to spam phpbb2 boards to get their website ranking up in the google list. They either post malicious messages to the forum or just register and promote their website link as they can be seen in the memberlist. To add countermeasures to spammers in phpbb2 forum, always have the latest version of phpbb2 installed plus install the following mods: 1. Enable the “confirm visual verification” option in the administration panel. This will ask a user who wants to register to type the characters seen on the image. This technology used behind this is CAPTCHA. This can still be hacked by more advanced bots so you can upgrade CAPTCHA to another technology that is more difficult to crack by ocr. 2. Change the variable name for “agreed” in the admin_users page. 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. 3. During registration process, prevent users from entering their website information. Allow this option only when they get to submit a particular number of posts. This mod is called Instant Ban. 4. Change the activation mode to Admin. This may be time consuming for the forum admin but this will allow you to not activate malicious registrants. In addition to this, install the mod activemembers so only active members will be displayed in your member list and newest registered member.
The items listed above are not a guarantee to have 0 spammers. It will at least minimize the spammers as well as make it easier for the admin and moderators to make administration work easily. This will only prevent bot spammers and not human spammers; although human spammers may get discouraged since there are restrictions installed on the forum. |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 05 May 2006 ) |
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