Looking to rebuild a forum

Nackmatholn

So I've been given the opportunity to rebuild a forum that has suffered quite a bad infestation of the 'ole porno spam bots.... The only forum I've dealt with so far is a private thing hosted on invisionfree using InvisionBoard. The one I'm looking to 'fix' is phpBB. What I'm looking to do is make it a controlled environment, atleast while i'm setting it all ablaze to chase out the spambots.... Is there a good resource for phpBB's and the adminning thereof? Like a cliffnotes version? or is it similar enough to invisionboard that I won't have an issue?

If I swing this one well enough I may be able to take over their now open Webmaster position aswell, and then I'd have 2 computer jobs:)

Thanatos

Appoint a few mods, ban all the spambots manually, and institute a CAPTCHA for registration.

Nackmatholn

It has a CAPTCHA at the moment, In Invision Power Board I can set it so new users must be approved, but seeing as I may be doing the moding solo.... I don't know... Is it possible to have a userclass that has to have their posts approved, and then 'upgrade' them when they are confirmed not to be spamers?

Also thanks for the suggestions, not attacking you Thinatos:)

Arikado

I moderate our WoW guild forum and earlier this year we got porn spammed really bad. Like, we'd look away for a minute and there'd be 10 new threads with porn links. Our forums are phpbb, btw.

Aside from manually banning the offenders, our admin did something with Google's cache or something, I'm not too clear about it, I'll ask him when he's awake (crazy aussies).

The other thing we did for the forums is require people to register to post. We have one non-registered forum but we haven't been hit since those changes. Also, there was some phpbb announcement from some admins about some dude from southeast Asia who's been hitting random forums with porn stuff and they had a listing of all the IPs to ban this douche.

I'll see if I can grab some more info.

Nackmatholn

Arikado wrote: »

I moderate our WoW guild forum and earlier this year we got porn spammed really bad. Like, we'd look away for a minute and there'd be 10 new threads with porn links. Our forums are phpbb, btw.

Aside from manually banning the offenders, our admin did something with Google's cache or something, I'm not too clear about it, I'll ask him when he's awake (crazy aussies).

The other thing we did for the forums is require people to register to post. We have one non-registered forum but we haven't been hit since those changes. Also, there was some phpbb announcement from some admins about some dude from southeast Asia who's been hitting random forums with porn stuff and they had a listing of all the IPs to ban this douche.

I'll see if I can grab some more info.

Awesome, thanks much arikado, keep me posted when you can get ahold of your aussie friend.

Arikado

Well, I found some of our old notes we stashed away when we were having this problem.
For starters, if you're using phpbb, you'll want to have the latest version from here. I'm pretty sure the latest build has a better CAPTCHA system in place.

The other change we did was rename our forum tag from "ourwebpage.org/forums" to "ourwebpage.org/forum" (minus the "s" on forums). We also removed the Google index bot from all the pages except the front page. Aside from eating bandwidth, it was also allowing spam bots to track their posts and to grab e-mails from forums.