My phpBB forums on music.com.bd, mobile.com.bd and sports.com.bd were being heavily spammed by some advanced forum spam bots. The spam bots were able to pass through the registration system and simple registration form tweakings.
I was looking for some good spam protection mods. I needed something that was somewhat a mature and actively in developmemnt. And also something that does not need too much code modifications (yah m lazy :$ ).
An Akismet plugin might be a great solution but Akismet has not yet realeased any official phpBB mod/plugin.
A few mods i came across only created a moderation quee which would end me up in spending all my day cleaning spam posts. Some were too complex to offer seperate spam rules for every forum. And most of them didnt sound to be an active project.
Then i found bbProtection.net which sounds like to be the best spam protection currently available for phpBB forums.
bbProtection.net has been designed combat spam through community participation of the bulletin board world. This is basically what Akismet has done for bloggers. bbProtection is to provide the similar solution for the bulletin board world.
The service is currently in beta stage and client is only available for phpBB2.
To use bbProtection.net with your phpBB forums you will need to signup a free account and download the client for phpBB2. Its actually what is knows as phpBB mods. Installation of the mods was not much complex. Oh! dont forget to use YOUR THEME instead of the SubSilver theme. (if you are usuing some other theme ofcourse.
After uploading the provided files and changing your phpBB codes as mentioned it will guide you through an installation process.
Here you will be provided a link to generate “private key” for your forum.
Paste your generted private key in the box and finish the installation process.
bbProtect.net lists all boards registered to you under your account and shows the stats to you.
They give you detailed spam activity stats of each of your boards.
Even a nice graph!
Now lets get back talking about the board side.
The mod adds a “Report Spam” option to every post. (Actually it adds a nice image botton. I converted it to text)
Clicking the link/button gives you several action options. It lets you report the spam post to bbProtection, delete the user from your forum and delete all post made by the spammer all with a single click. cool ha?
The spam post and spammer gets reported to bbProtection.net
Do you allow guest postings? You can also report guest spam posts.
bbProtection.net is now in beta stage and accepting a limited number of boards to get registered. So, install it on your board before they close registration.
So far i have found it to be a great service. My boards are spam-free now :D
Tags: phpBB, Spam, Spam-Protection, Tech, Technology, Tips and Tricks
Categories: Tech, Tips and Tricks
