Preventing Spam on this Board?

anonymous · Post by **anonymous** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 10:14 am

Hi,

Is there some way how we can prevent spam on this topic board? Here anonymous posting is allowed (like my post). But recently, every day there are those "Thank you" and the like posts.

I am not sure if this message board software supports those pictures you gotta type in what is written on them prior to posting. Pics have some obscured text that is not recognizable by OCR and other software. Or maybe there is some other way - of course for this topics prior to purchase the plans a form of anynomous posting should be allowed and that's great.

Any thoughts?

chrisobee · Post by **chrisobee** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 2:14 pm

I will summerize previous threads that have started with a similar message.

1. Compared to other PHP boards there is little spam here.
2. The open nature of this single board is by design and the management wishes it to stay that way.
3. The management delete such messages daily.
4. The management does many other things of which we are largly unaware to limit spam here.
5. Users should not trouble with messages with the subject of "Thank you".

Post by **jacquesmm** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 6:26 pm

We can stop them but that means that we have to restrict privileges of "guest" users and we don't want to do that.
More about it on Monday.

CET · Post by **CET** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 10:25 pm

Guest,

SPAM is an unfortunate reality of the current Internet environment. Until someone finds a cure, no one is immune. However, if you can look beyond the few SPAM messages here, youâ€™ll find this board is a fantastic and unparalleled source of boat building information and knowledge, and itâ€™s all FREE to you!! This forum is the greatest value in boat building, ever! I strongly suggest you see it for what it is and just forget the SPAM. Seriously!

No affiliation, just a happy customer.

CET

anonymous · Post by **anonymous** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 8:53 pm

Of course - board should be open. I am just saying that there could be a spam verification system introduced which would prevent automatic spaming programs to use it - you probably saw on many websites nowadays where they ask you to type in a box a word that you see in some image box. That box image is constructed with shading and other garbage on it so that image processing algorithms can't decypher the string automatically - only humans can. So a program can't post.

CET · Post by **CET** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 9:13 pm

Of course - board should be open. I am just saying that there could be a spam verification system introduced which would prevent automatic spaming programs to use it - you probably saw on many websites nowadays where they ask you to type in a box a word that you see in some image box. That box image is constructed with shading and other garbage on it so that image processing algorithms can't decypher the string automatically - only humans can. So a program can't post.

Yeah, I make my living in software design so I understand. Itâ€™s just that under the circumstances your suggestion makes you sound rather ungrateful.

CET

gk108 · Post by **gk108** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 9:40 pm

The new webmaster says the forums are overdue for some updates. I believe what you are asking for is available in newer versions of phpbb. Using the domain name will help expose this bb to search engine spiders like it never has been. Gotta do something before too long, anyway.

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 1:49 am

There are several radical ways to stop spammers operating:

- firing squad for all CEOs of companies that use spam to promote their products - highly efficient but not legal in most parts

- teaching people not to click on links in spam - very time consuming, may solve unemployment crisis for senoir IT folk however

- switch all computers from Windows to Linux or Mac OS X - this will turn off all the owned computers being used as spam relays the world over. Cheapest most efficient solution - may not please his Billness and the MS trained ape, er CEO...

A real easy way is protecting your computer with a firewall - this may prevent you from steal... er sharing music and films until you learn how to set up your firewall. But it is highly recommended procedure.

You will be amazed at how fast your computer and aDSL connection will work once you have stopped the spammers from using your machine in their network!

Cheers

Tony

bateau-webmaster · Post by **bateau-webmaster** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 2:32 am

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=427852

4. Disable guest posting
If you allow guests to post, SPAM bots will not even bother registering. It is therefore generally recommended that you disable guest posting on your board (find out how). If you absolutely must allow guests to post, I suggest you install the Anti-bot Guest Post MOD (#2 below) by otseng or the Visual Confirmation for Guests MOD by Kanuck (#15 below).

Just a question of time now. Much like waiting for new designs - there is a list of projects to do in a certain order...

Spam is an annoyance, not a danger (as long as you don't click the links - thanks kiwi) for you the board user.

Post by **jacquesmm** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:55 am

I am looking at that mod since a year and we may very well install it once some other problems are solved.

Thanks for all the suggestions but we know about most of those "solutions" and have implemented them since years. For example, we use visual confirmation for registration but the spambots know how to defeat that.
I had to write my own mod to keep them out but we still have many spam registration attempts.
Same fro the mod listed in the previous post, some spambots have already found a way around it.
It's not as simple as some of you may think.

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