Med-Psych.com

I've been gettnig a lot of spam postings the past 48hrs on my phpbb3 designed websites. I'm guessing that someone came up with a spambot that can figure out the captcha built into phpbb3. I was already using the more advanced captcha, but now I've also made settings to make it more complicated. Unfortunately, the more complicated it becomes for a computer recognition program, the more complicated it comes for the human eye as well. I HATE captcha's that are hard to read. But now I realize why they have to be that way.

I'll see if these new settings keep the spam out. If not, I'll have to require an account before allowing posts - and I really like allowing people to post with guest accounts. Oh well - we'll see how this goes. I may also explore other options but I hate doing too many modifications to the software as it is a pain to redo them with every new software update.

Well - the first attempt at adding foreground noise alone didn't seem to do it, so I increased the x and y axis noise and that seems to have done the trick. Unfortunately, these captcha's are also very hard for humans to read right now. I'm going to again get rid of the foreground noise and see if that works better. Meanwhile, on my other websites, I've just turned off the guest posting until I get a better antispam method.

No spam has gotten through in the past hour - but maybe the spambots aren't on the site right now. We'll see if they get through the looser captcha settings. I did manage to find this thread talking about the recent string of phpbb spammings. Again - I hate to implement the more elaborate antispam measures as they might get broken with each update. Hopefully they'll just build something better into the next upgrade, assuming the captcha settings can't be adjusted.

Well - the thread I referenced above was locked and now points to this thread. Looks like others are having the same problems. I haven't had any more spam since I tightened up the settings on this site - and I even made it a little easier for human eyes - but it is still a bit of a pain. I went ahead and again am allowing guest posting on my other site - we'll see how long before I start seeing spam again. If I start getting spam again with these settings, it looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and install one of the anti-spam mods.

Since I made the captcha settings a little stricter, I've only had one spam post make it through. So, while not perfect, it does seem to be better. I'm guessing now that this has happened and is recognized by the phpbb folks, there will be much better spam protection in the next version. I hope so as I HATE spam.

2I'm still getting some spam to the boards and it looks like I may have to disable guest posting until the updates to phpbb are made. For now I'll try requiring posts to be approved before they show up until someone has my authorization to post without approval.

So it turns out that increasing the captcha setting made a big difference, but I'd still get occasional spam coming through. I've gone ahead and set the guest posts and first post for a registered user to require moderator approval. As the boards I manage don't get that much traffic, it isn't that big of a deal to do the moderation of all anonymous posts.

I did go ahead and set the captcha settings back to an easier level - in just a few hours I've gotten several spam postings. Fortunately, they don't show up because I require the moderator approval. So for those who think that making the captcha setting stricter doesn't help - it does in fact help, but occasional spam may still get through.

I'm expecting in the next upgrade of phpBB, there will better spam protection. That'll help, until someone finds a way to get past the new method.

Easing up the captcha settings was a BAD idea. I went from getting about 1 spam post per day to getting 40. I went ahead and set the captcha settings back to strict. It also turns out that new threads started by guests would show up on my main page, but you couldn't view the post.

I guess I'll look forward to better spam prevention in the next version.

So I finally got around to updating to 3.0.5 of phpBB and I'm still using the SEO modified version of this software (which I love). I have to say the included captcha settings seem a bit weaker than I had hoped for. I went ahead and tweaked the settings slightly, but I still find the captcha's very hard to read. I'll see if they come up with some settings that are a nice compromise.

I know the best method (that I've seen so far) is when someone just modifies and adds an additional space that needs to be completed for a post or registration to go through, but as much as possible, I'm trying to avoid modifying the basic software.

I'm testing out the new spam protection found in the newest version of phpbb3. I'm seeing how well the question and answer method works. I'm assuming it'll work well enough that I won't need to moderate every post before it goes live. Of course, we'll have to wait and see how this works. I may have to change my question as the answer may be a bit too obvious.

If it's a problem, I can always just go back to moderating the forums. I just didn't like how complicated I had to keep the captcha's to keep the bots from posting here. I really hope this method does the trick.