members who ain't!

[tom]

The last two joiners on our memberlist appear to be spam entries.
"gonzalo Flowers" is a gibberish website and the other one is a US shopping mall. There are no BXs in the USA so he ain't one of us. More work for our mods I fear!

[Kitch]

Surprises me that there isn't a filter in place to stop these artificial losers. We have one on OB, works well.

[djoptix]

It's quite difficult to stop them. I moderate a forum for a band and have to delete on average one spam user a day.

I noticed yesterday that the AX forum has an "are you human" question as well as the image-based verification, maybe that works for them. It's probably a phpBB add-on, I'm going to have a look for it.

[M]

It's quite difficult to stop them. I moderate a forum for a band and have to delete on average one spam user a day.

And the rest - I log on two or three times a day and usually have to delete at least one or more spamming feckwit.

[djoptix]

Marty/jonkw, if you don't use it already I highly recommend the Starfoxtj phpBB toolkit. It lets you delete users and do a load more useful stuff in a much more logical fashion than phpBB's own front end will let you. You just have to give it a REALLY secure password as it's so powerful.

This is a description of all the stuff it can do:

http://starfoxtj.phpbbhelp.org/phpBB/toolkit/

And here's a support forum for the toolkit with downloads of the current release:

http://starfoxtj.no-ip.com/forum/

[docchevron]

There are no BXs in the USA so he ain't one of us.

There's at least one BX in the states Tom, that I know of, theres bound to be more though.

That said, spammers are tossers. I still cant work out what they hope to gain, Myspace is full of it, so it's not quite as bad here but nontheless, I think we should start exterminating these people CHOPPER style!

[Mr B]

And the rest - I log on two or three times a day and usually have to delete at least one or more spamming feckwit.

Me to! Three today, at least the buggers can't post anymore

[AlanS]

The biggest worry IMO is that I suspect once they sign in and even before they are activated, they can look up profiles.
On a couple of the forums where I have access to the admin forum and have to manually activate the memberships, a few members when they fill in their details have ticked the option to allow public display of their e-mail address and I reckon these spamming toerags harvest these to spam and sell on.
I usually change that if I see it, however, I've yet to see a spammer who ticks the "yes" box to this, so.........................when they sign on, I make it so they can't access their own profiles and info and if they have what appears to be a genuine e-mail address, I tick the yes for them. That way, their mates can spam them and there ain't nuthin' they can do about it; called poetic justice I think. If they lodge a dodgy e-mail adress and it seems that the website is genuine, then I use the ISP in the website and transpose it into their e-mail addy. This way they get a chance to spam each other.


Alan S

[artic-steel]

but can be irritating for "genuine" new members

Tell me about it, i'm trying to join another car forum so i can offload some parts (FOC of course), i need the space for more BX stuff

Seriously though, i can see the need for it spammers are scum.keep up the good work mods

[capri]

This is for anyone who's had problems with bots on their phpBB, including BXClub... I've found this works a treat:

http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/6697

Implement it and an extra question is added to the registration process which can only be answered by humans (for example, a simple arithmetic question, a picture recognition question, or an advanced visual confirmation). We implemented it and since that time a few months ago, we haven't had a single bot sign up, whereas before we were getting new bots once a day. Definitely worthwhile if you genuinely want to stop the bots!