Stop Forum Spamers

Lot of black-hat seo, link builders and stupid webmasters found posting links to their web site on message board and guest book is easy to drive traffic to their web site.

Now there are virus, worms and spambots, that can signup your message board and get listed on your memberlist page, profile page. Some spambots can even post spam messages on your forum.

This made running a message board more difficult. Forum webmasters need to moderate their forums and stop the spamers and spam bots. Cleaning up forum need lot of effors when your forum become popular or target of spamers.

Most forum use community support to keep the forum clean, stop spamers. This is done by selecting some of the active forum members as MODERATOR.

phpBB forum provide some way to stop spamers.

Captcha

Captcha is image verification system, that shows an image on signup forum. Visitor need to type in this number correctly on signup forum. Only human can read this number. Spambots can't do it (research is going on to break CAPTCHA

User Verification

phpBB have 3 options, you can set this in Admin control panel, config menu

Enable account activation - None / User / Admin

If you select None, users can register with out proper email id, this will make more spam on your forum. In our forums, we have disabled this, so if you set to "None", it will be considered as "User"

User - user need to click on a link send to his email id. This will verify the user have a valid email.

Admin - when user signup, admin is send a mail. Admin need to activate the account. If your forum is small, you may opt for this.