On Thu, 4 Mar 2010 20:03:22 -0800, [email protected] wrote: > > Anyone have any ideas on how to help alleviate the spamming problem > of a forum board? >
Randy, One thing we did on one board I've been on was to make all legitimate, non-spammer users part of a custom group, Full Members. (All new members are part of the Registered Users group by default. That's apparently fixed in phpBB, and can't be changed.) Full Members have all the normal posting privileges. New members make a posting in a forum specifically for them (the only one open to Registered Users), saying something about the site. Those postings are not visible to the rest of the site. The moderators read the post, and if they approve, the new member's posting is approved, making it visible to all, and he or she is made a Full Member. Now on a busy board this can take up a lot of the moderator's time. In fact, the board I'm on has volunteers who weed through the new postings. They disapprove spammers, reporting them to the mods. Newcomers who make the grade (it doesn't really take much) are approved, get Full Member status, and a Welcome! We Want Poetry! message. (We pester newcomers for poetry. It's not much of a tradition, but it's what we've got.) If a new member later turns out to be a spammer in disguise, well, out comes the banhammer. Wham! Another thing you can do is ban specific IP addresses, blocks of addresses, or various domains. A few months ago our admin went so far as to ban everyone in the .ru domain. The number of spammers dropped precipitously. Anyway, I hope this helps. --Dale -- Q: What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches? A: A nervous wreck. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
