Spammer Reporting?
Moderator: Chip
Spammer Reporting?
Is there and quick and easy way to report spammers so we can keep the forum clear of clutter? Or at least make more room for OP-Doug?
Quickest and easiest is to just update the PHPBB from the circa 2004 version 2, Up to the modern ver 3. I'm surprised that there aren't as many bots spamming us.
Talking with DavisS, someone who runs a large free flight forum, about search engines. There are a bunch of problems that arise when you allow them to crawl the entries.
Talking with DavisS, someone who runs a large free flight forum, about search engines. There are a bunch of problems that arise when you allow them to crawl the entries.
There are lots of bots spamming us. Sometimes 4-6 posts in a day.
Sometimes days go by without a post, but still a lot. Ken Andrews has done a good job with a fairly tight captcha for creating new logins and that slows the rate of new identity formation.
I get up every morning and list new logins in reverse chronological order and delete every new identity with formats such as "geraldineJoeBob66444997" etc who usually link to "cheap Nike Shoes" or "World of Warcraft Gold" etc sites. That cuts down a lot on the spam posts. When spam appears, I usually get rid of it within 24 hours (except when I'm on vacation as in the last two weeks). I also check first posts from new identities to make sure they are relevant to our forum.
As far as crawlers go, I have banned a number of IP addresses of known "bad behavior" robots. On the other hand, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc also crawl our site and produce useful results in that our site rises in search rankings both by being indexed and by being free of spam. BTW, the "bad behavior" bots will not respect a robots.txt file.
Actually reporting spammers is probably not necessary because the spam posts are always from new identities and they are easy to locate and delete.
On the other hand, moving to version 3 would be a help. However, we have a number of scripts running that use the Microsoft Access database which is not available in PHPBB version 3 -- runs on MySQL. Chip has done some nice work and has a prototype forum he prepared using version 3 and it appears to work. However, the current forum does work pretty well and, since this is a volunteer run forum and since Chip has a day job, the rev 3 version is not installed. Doing the inevitable debug on a new software block will be time consuming and we'll need to weigh that decision carefully.
Sometimes days go by without a post, but still a lot. Ken Andrews has done a good job with a fairly tight captcha for creating new logins and that slows the rate of new identity formation.
I get up every morning and list new logins in reverse chronological order and delete every new identity with formats such as "geraldineJoeBob66444997" etc who usually link to "cheap Nike Shoes" or "World of Warcraft Gold" etc sites. That cuts down a lot on the spam posts. When spam appears, I usually get rid of it within 24 hours (except when I'm on vacation as in the last two weeks). I also check first posts from new identities to make sure they are relevant to our forum.
As far as crawlers go, I have banned a number of IP addresses of known "bad behavior" robots. On the other hand, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc also crawl our site and produce useful results in that our site rises in search rankings both by being indexed and by being free of spam. BTW, the "bad behavior" bots will not respect a robots.txt file.
Actually reporting spammers is probably not necessary because the spam posts are always from new identities and they are easy to locate and delete.
On the other hand, moving to version 3 would be a help. However, we have a number of scripts running that use the Microsoft Access database which is not available in PHPBB version 3 -- runs on MySQL. Chip has done some nice work and has a prototype forum he prepared using version 3 and it appears to work. However, the current forum does work pretty well and, since this is a volunteer run forum and since Chip has a day job, the rev 3 version is not installed. Doing the inevitable debug on a new software block will be time consuming and we'll need to weigh that decision carefully.
