Fighting spam

[spookyboo]

Recently i got a lot of spam on my forum (phpBB3). Do you guys have some tips how to fight it, because every day I have to delete about 10 posts.

[DanielSefton]

It's hard because spammers are getting more sophisticated - it used to be the case where spammers found it difficult to infiltrate phpBB3. Obviously they're now targeting it because phpBB2 has gone.

Build up a blacklist over time. Keep adding dodgy emails, IPs, usernames and censors (with wildcards!) according to the type of spam you're getting. Increase the strength of the captcha. Make sure you have email validation turned on. Add a required custom field at registration with something like "enter a 2 digit number". I have so many censors in my forums it isn't even funny. So any spammer's posts just look like a mass of ******** **** *****, and they give up eventually. But apart from that, it's the job of moderation that takes care of the rest. It's got to be done unfortunately.

[Klaim]

Specific solution for specific forums seems to be the better solution.

[PolyVox]

I've had the same problem - I started getting spam on my PhPBB3 forum only this week. Guess I've just landed on someones list of target sites. However, in my case, simply enabling user activation (so they have to click a link in an email) has stopped it. They all seem to use invalid email addresses so far. The only downside is I get about 10 "Email could not be delivered" emails as they bounce back. But at least they are being kept off the forums.

[jacmoe]

User activation does the trick for my forum.
I know who to delete when the bounce mails arrive.