Spam prevention

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Trilarion
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Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

And to further fight excessive spammers I had to change registration to be verified by an admin (me). Registration numbers of genuine users is currently ten times less than registration attempts of spam accounts. So for the time being I will conduct some Turing tests. :)

Unfortunately easy access has suffered a bit, but the numbers of spam attacks is just too big lately.
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Trilarion
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Location: Central germany

Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

So far it works. Two new spam registrations could be catched before they are able to make any damage. I just checked them agains stopforumspam. Now I wish phpbb would allow me to do this automatically.
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Trilarion
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Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

Occasionally (but much less frequent than last year) we still have spambots trying to register. Apparently the inbuilt google captcha is far from perfect. By searching in stopforumspam I can identify them but it means the manual verification of registrations has to remain in place.
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Trilarion
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Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

Recently (last two weeks) we witnessed a surge in spambot registration attempts (~20 attempts) which is a bit surprising after months of silence (only the occasional spambot per month). Also they are still quite obvious to detect.

Have to check again if phpbb has better anti spam bot measures now.
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Trilarion
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Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

Trilarion wrote:... I just checked them agains stopforumspam. Now I wish phpbb would allow me to do this automatically.
Seems somebody listened. I just installed the Stop Forum Spam extension. Let's see how well it works...
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Trilarion
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Location: Central germany

Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

This extension proved to be effective so far. I could finally relax the account activation and we are back to immediate posting access (after email verification that is). Also, no more manual mass deletion of spam accounts anymore. Thank god!
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Trilarion
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Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

Two weeks after activating the stopforumspam extension I can say that it is very effective. About 20 spambot registration attempts have been silently discarded. That is fantastic. Funny enough the number of spamming attempts has increased too. I wonder why...
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Trilarion
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Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

So far the stopforumspam extension worked very well and prevented many spambot registrations (approximately 3-4 per day). However, recently two came through and opened spam threads. They were deleted manually by me, but only a few hours/days later. That is probably the price one has to pay for convenient registration for real users. My guess is that the spambots that got through the defenses were real humans too, at least to some extent. I think for the time being, I can live with the situation. No defense is really 100% safe. On the other hand I think about restricting posting for newly registered users during their first days. That should limit the damage of registered spam accounts which will get deleted manually.
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Trilarion
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Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: Spam prevention

Post by Trilarion »

High activity of spambots currently. Registrations will need additional activation by the board admin for the next time.
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