Cheshire Cat Computing

Hi Steve (and others),

Well, for my first post here I can tell you a few things you may consider about spam.
Firstly, spam automated tools have greatly improve recently. It was a niche market a few years ago, but now they are used by many many internet pros.
And as you've said it, if spam softwares can't break captchas or enter the place, people are paid to do it.

Spam comments usually come in this flavour : A new account is created. The "profile" and "signature" sections are filled up, then a topic where to post are seeked for on the forum.
Usually, the first one are not too spammy as they might get caught (ie. Askimet plugin). But after a few posts and within a few days/weeks, the spam stuff comes with URLS nested in the comments. Most of the time it's a mixture of contents scrapped from other foras and conversations (Experts websites, Yahoo Answers...) If some replies seems to make sense while a bit "coming out of the blue", you can copy and paste their sentences to check wether it's not actually taken from some other place.

Some spam are easily spotted while others not so. You can then trust your human intuition : who is behind ? Not speaking about IPs, and countries (ie. proxies, vpn, etc) but about account themselves. I've provided my URL in my profile part, and it links to my website, there is my picture, my contact informations, etc. It's an important "trust" factor I think, because spammers don't provide actual and real informations. They just link to obscure websites that links themselves to their moneysites, never giving away info that could help to trace them.

As it has been suggested to you, because of the time-wasting task of cleaning up your forum, you could think of requesting the help of other users.

Best regards and Merry Christmas from France !
Yann

Yes, I can see only human now

Install some plugins best anti-spam, plus check images and so, and sorry for my bad english

I wasn't going to post anything in this thread but after seeing some of the post by aliceo2, I just had to say they are spammers of unmitigated gall. Not only are they posting advertising they are just making new topics for their spam garbage. I don't know the best way to stop spammers, but pretty much any solution will eventually be bypassed. The best solution which has been mentioned is just get more help moderating the boards.

I'm pretty new to all of this and was unaware of all the bots, but what if you made your forum "no follow"? Wouldn't it then be a waste of time for spammers to post links to the forum?

And if that doesn't work, just hire a Chinese sweat shop to clean out all the spam...

How about manually approving the first posting? This will greatly reduce the spam.

That's a good idea, but the current version of phpbb I'm using doesn't support it. Also, I'd still be deluged in spam emails asking for approval

If I can upgrade phpbb to the latest then I can install add-ons to prevent posting for X minutes after registering, or maybe granting various rights (posting without approval, embedded URLs, etc) after a certain number of postings. However the spammers are wise to this and always post several trick messages to get their count up before posting the real spam.

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

@mjohnson: The problem with making the forum nofollow (which I know how to do) is that it means no Google searches for forum contents. Many people come here after a Google search for answers to a particular problem, and blocking search engines from the forum would stop that. Although we have a low posting rate here, there is a very high non-registered reader rate, which comes from Google searches to questions answered in the forum history.

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11