Spam poured in after our recent move to a phpBB3 forum. Captchas, registration questions, and other measures only stopped the stupidest scripts and annoyed everyone.
No more of that cat and mouse game, we’re trying something new. We deny spammers what they want: most links are now disabled for new users and guests. This dead-simple simple spam prevention method has stopped 100%* of spam so far, while being transparent to most people.
New users can post and join the party right away, no annoying moderation queues and impossible captchas. Common sites are white-listed, your favorites are probably excluded from the filter. Spambots and human spammers leave confused because they can’t deliver their toxic payload. Limitations are removed automatically for obvious non-spammers.
This method has been so effective that we removed all registration hassles, and enabled guest posting**. We may even go one step further and remove email confirmation. Enjoy forums like it’s August 1993.
Our anti-spam MOD is a feverish 4am rewrite (thanks GPL!) of the fantastic work done by Philthy, Skinny Vinny, and many others. We hope it will be rolled into a future version of the original phpBB3 MOD. For now, you can read our documentation and install instructions on the wiki.
- Disable links for new users and guests MOD in phpBB3 forum
- Our development log in the phpBB3 forum
- More about our anti-spam strategy and MOD documentation
The picture is an extract from the forum log. An automated purge removes zombie registrations like these every two hours.
*After removing the captcha one really stupid scripted attack that thought it had a spammy signature and posted an ego spam “Nice! Thanks for sharing!”. However, because of the link filter no actual spam was delivered.
**We’ll see how that goes.
cool !
if we can kill all those spammers life will be great !