<i>EDIT: spam erased by iblis - user deactivated - eat at joes; admins pm me if more information is needed. </i>

HOLYHOLY SHIT TO THE SPAM.

Might I suggest adding a captcha registration mod or some other spambot fighting mods to phpbb?

There are plenty out there.

Jeebus Christie!

Or you could always add the tag line:

Knoxgothic, your one stop porn, debt consolidation, want ad surplus.

Or you could always get a real forum engine like Vanilla. You know... maybe enter the 21st century and we could all do nifty things like use RSS to follow threads and what not.

I think after this shit vader should get a raise....ill buy u a bongwater....

vertigo25 wrote:Or you could always get a real forum engine like Vanilla. You know... maybe enter the 21st century and we could all do nifty things like use RSS to follow threads and what not.

funny, i was following this thread via RSS today.

http://www.knoxgothic.com/forum/rss.php

so, how are you defining the term "real forum engine"?

i mean, phpBB and vanilla both run on php and they both rely on add-ons for additional functionality.

i'm asking this as a serious, honest question, by the way.

Nephilim wrote:Might I suggest adding a captcha registration mod or some other spambot fighting mods to phpbb?

There are plenty out there.

i was under the impression that we had some kind of "this is a gay image with text - type the text in if you're not a robot" mod on here for registering.

maybe it's not sophisticated enough to prevent spambots anymore... i mean, OCR isn't all that difficult to do (there are a handful of tutorials available on perlmonks.org for it).

then again, it's been a while since i went to register a new account, so i can't guarantee that's still in place.

iblis wrote:i was under the impression that we had some kind of "this is a gay image with text - type the text in if you're not a robot" mod on here for registering.

maybe it's not sophisticated enough to prevent spambots anymore... i mean, OCR isn't all that difficult to do (there are a handful of tutorials available on perlmonks.org for it).

then again, it's been a while since i went to register a new account, so i can't guarantee that's still in place.

That was merely an example. There are other methods of accomplishing some spambot filtering as well.

Either way, I quit using phpbb because (among other reasons) their release cycle was talking too long and it hasn't been exactly well known for its security (of course this may or may not have changed since the last time I used it).

Besides, there are other free forum packages out there that have more features 'out of the box', have better spambot detection 'out of the box', and are easier to maintain/update/add mods to than phpbb.

...but I'm not here to tell Vader what to do. I just offer help or suggestions where I may.

Nephilim wrote:

iblis wrote:i was under the impression that we had some kind of "this is a gay image with text - type the text in if you're not a robot" mod on here for registering.

maybe it's not sophisticated enough to prevent spambots anymore... i mean, OCR isn't all that difficult to do (there are a handful of tutorials available on perlmonks.org for it).

then again, it's been a while since i went to register a new account, so i can't guarantee that's still in place.

That was merely an example. There are other methods of accomplishing some spambot filtering as well.

Either way, I quit using phpbb because (among other reasons) their release cycle was talking too long and it hasn't been exactly well known for its security (of course this may or may not have changed since the last time I used it).

Besides, there are other free forum packages out there that have more features 'out of the box', have better spambot detection 'out of the box', and are easier to maintain/update/add mods to than phpbb.

...but I'm not here to tell Vader what to do. I just offer help or suggestions where I may.

hey, suggestions are good. what are you using now? vanilla, like vert mentioned?

and how did and/or could you convert your old forum db to the new one?

I'm using Simple Machines Forum. It's free and awesome, and they have DB converters for all the major forums out there.

Nephilim wrote:I'm using Simple Machines Forum. It's free and awesome, and they have DB converters for all the major forums out there.

looking into it now.

For the record, we're using "this is a gay image with text - type the text in if you're not a robot", we're using an automatic email account test that actually asks the user's SMTP server if the account is valid, and I've even thrown in a few other things, like firewalling out about half of Asia.

From what I can tell, the spammers are using humans with real email accounts, and doing this manually. Quite a few of them are using gmail accounts - and if we didn't have so many real users with gmail accounts, I'd just blanket ban gmail.

I watched a few of the Vanilla demos - I don't like it. I don't think this is fixable with software anyway.

So, I've made one more change that will keep them from posting. I've switched account activation to admin. This means legit new users will have a delay before they can post, but I'm out of other ideas.