Block spam by content?

Post by **ElizabethD** » Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:53 am

Is there a way for you, Rob, to block by content.
I just came here to delete yet another about nutritionless dot com, but I see someone beat me to it.
User name keeps changing, email address keeps changing, so content might be the only way.
They've been a pest for several weeks now. Usually on weekends, but as today shows, it might be more frequent.

Post by **The Robman** » Tue Feb 26, 2019 11:37 am

Not that I know of. I usually have to delete 2 or 3 spam posts a day. It does occur to me that I could automatically block posts where the subject line starts with HTTP but I haven't taken the time to figure out how to write the code.

zaphod7501 · Post by **zaphod7501** » Wed Feb 27, 2019 7:00 am

We had to disable automatic registration of new users and manually add them upon request. Our forum was "mature" and had very few new legitimate additions.

The former admin would go through requests (weekly) and only add people he knew to be legitimate. I'm pretty sure you can also block by ip address but that could block legitimate requests if they came from the same shared hosting provider.

I don't know if phpbb has a 3 question option like Facebook to even pass the request on. Our forum is currently broken into read-only because our host upgraded to php7 and broke our version. I have not had time to patch it yet. Not much pressure to fix it since I was literally the only posting user for 2 years. (I used the forum to post the minutes of our Mountain Bike Club meetings)

Post by **The Robman** » Wed Feb 27, 2019 9:21 am

I have in the past restricted new accounts to be manually approved, when we were getting inundated with spam, but it does prove very time consuming for the few moderators that we have, as we do still get 20 - 30 new members each week (remember, that you need to be a member to download files).

While I have patched the PHPBB code here and there, I'm not really a PHPBB developer, so it would likely prove very time consuming for me to write a mod to automatically block bots who post with HTTP in the subject line, which is what I'd love to do.

Barf · Post by **Barf** » Thu Feb 28, 2019 3:27 am

My 2 cents:

The spam certainly is an annoyance, but it is not a "pest" or a plague. It does not jeopardize the function of the forum.

The spammers also tend to be able to learn and to adapt their post to circumvent anti-spam attempts.

Bottom line: until the spam really does jeopardize the function of the forum, keep things as they are. Please no cure that is worse than the disease!