Spam Prevention

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=2122696

https://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom ... mmer-tool/

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=2122696

https://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom ... mmer-tool/

Thanks for the links, Verhaden. I'll pass them along to our site Admin over at Unseen Servant, too, in case he doesn't have them in place.

We've instituted a "verification" process there, as well. Anytime a new user ID is created, a Moderator or Admin has to approve the first two posts before they become visible to anyone else. Then the Admin adds that name to a Safe list. So even when those wily spam bastards figure out how to get past the filters, the only people who have to see the junk postings is the moderators.

Yeah last night was kind of annoying.. Lucky cleanup is pretty simple but improved prevention would be lovely. The captcha is basically obsolete, the Spam Bots have cracked that long ago. The extra profile or math question is probably what I need to add next. i do have some a little custom check that catches a lot at registration time which is why we've had it pretty good so far. But spam is an endless war... Apologies for the blanket of spam, what you did not see was the 65 messages queues for Approval.

-Mike

It's an arms race, that's for sure

Thanks for the help guys.

Mike has been doing an awesome job fighting back the evil-doers for us.

It's interesting to observe, perhaps, that most of the spam attacks seem to occur during the north-american day/australian night. So by the time I get onto the board, Mike has already dealt with them. For the minority that occur during the australian day/north-american night, I get to zap them while Mike is sleeping (though I suspect he's a bit like a dragon in that even when he's sleeping he has half and eye open). So, between us we have more-or-less 24 hour coverage.

On the otherhand, anything that can reduce Mike's manual workload would be a good thing for sure.