PhpBB FAQ - Anti-Spam
My Forum is full of spam messages, how can I avoid that? How can I get rid of spammers? How can I prevent it from being hacked?
Spamming is the biggest problem you have to deal with when using PhpBB. That’s because it is the most used forum engine. The developers of PhpBB are aware of this issue and try to improve the anti-spam mechanisms with every update.
I once found myself in the situation of having the forum heavily spammed. But it's not just the forum. Also my other website files were hacked. Spam bots accessed those files through the PhpBB forum which was really scary to me.
Fortunately there currently is an easy way to keep spamming away from your Board. Usually spamming is not made by real people but it is caused by applications developed by hackers. To avoid spam all you need to do is create a custom field as described here...
Creating a custom field to prevent spamming
Login to your admin area
Go to Users and groups
Custom profile fields, choose drop down box (it's really important to use the dropdown box)
Make a field like
"Are you sure you want to join the forum?"
Hit Create new field
Under visibility choose the following settings
Under field description enter which is the right answer to make sure no one types it wrong
Under Entries type the possible answers "Yes" "NO"
Hit profile type specific options
You will get a warning saying the field identification accepts only lower case
Hence change the field identification to "join_or_not"
and re-hit profile type specific options
Under default value make sure the wrong answer is selected
Same for the option equal to non-entered value
This way the one who wants to register to the forum is obliged to change the value.
Hit Save (on the right).
Go to General and choose Purge the cache for the changes to take effect (Cofirm=>Yes)
Other ideas:
"Do you want to spam on my forum?" (The answer is NO)
YES
NO
Default value and equal to non entered is YES
-------------------
"1+5 equals" (The answer is 6)
1
6
Default value and equal to non entered is 1
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