The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
We have a problem: Massive amounts of spam on a daily basis, some of it containing explicit images.
This is exacerbated by the fact that phpBB's admin tools are total garbage and let me do almost nothing about it except ban IP's/emails and delete users, and those only very very clumsily with terribly difficult-to-work-with interfaces. I've enabled all the anti-bot protection.
Hardcore images in bot-generated spams are a lawsuit in the making for the Instant Boats web site. So how in God's name do I stop it?
And why the hell can't my mods ban users from posting?
DVGNo. 1 Honor StudentNether Institute, Evil AcademyRegistered Userregular
edited June 2007
I threw in the towel on the war against spambots and just set it up so you don't have any posting rights unless I add you to a usergroup, and you have to PM me to do that. There are a ton of spambots registered on my board, but the worse they can do is have links in their profile that no one ever looks at.
Here is a the problem with that though: I do not have time to approve all new accounts in a timely manner. I check this forum about twice a day and let my mods handle the rest. There is no way to allow mods to approve new accounts, so it's all on me. I've rarely visited a forum where I had to wait for approval of my new account, and I've never seen 20 spam posts containing pornographic images on a forum either, but I'm regularly confronted by that type of thing on my forum.
My ideal solution would be to simply require approval of new users being able to post images, and deal with textual spam as per usual.
Posts
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=393503
I have captcha's turned on, and email registration too.
There is still spam.
Somewhere, humans are being paid to spam their little board.
Approval of new accounts is the only way to fix this.
My ideal solution would be to simply require approval of new users being able to post images, and deal with textual spam as per usual.