Uncreative Labs

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

Dang new computers eating up all my time Laughing

.

I just noticed I now have over 1100 members on my board. I guess I'll have to clean that out now Evil or Very Mad

.

At this point I'm mainly keeping my site up in case uncreativelabs.org goes down again. I hardly notice the 9.95 a month and it's nice to have 3 gigs of storage. I'm thinking about finishing up some updates I started over a year ago but time is something I rarely have much of anymore (thats why spammers are running my board now Shocked

).

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

I cleaned out the boards (that stuff was just nasty!). And here I was glad to be running a family friendly site. Stuff like that makes me sick. Next to clean out the userbase.

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

I tried to register on your forum, but there are lots of errors that stop me...

To get rid of the spam, make sure that you run the latest version of phpBB (2.0.20) and turn on the visual confirmation on the user signup (admin > config).

Smile

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

if you mean there was "
junk" om your board that you did not like?
that seems to be all over.
I have dropped out of several yahoo forums on photography
one "black and white" seemed to be less interested in
b&w film and processing, than sex between " B&W " men and women.
other forums were similarly spammed.

i wish stupid people would start their OWN forum and leave decent forumns alone. OR just go away,

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

harshbarj, if I where you, I would just be inclined to scrap your current forum and database and start afresh with a new installation and new database. Since there are so many SPAM member accounts, they will always be coming back again and posting annoying stuff (as I found out to my cost...)

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 9:27 pm

I think they target PHPBB boards. The reason we don't have problems is Uncreative Labs is locked down as tight as we can get it without being oppressive. We've also got a moderator in T-R-A who keeps the board spam free.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

We've also got a moderator in T-R-A who keeps the board spam free.

Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment...

Now that becomes even easier with DSL here at home. Very Happy

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

I upgraded to the latest version. If someone knows a simple way to trim out junk accounts from the old database I can restore (or try to) the old accounts.

Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 7:35 am

I'm looking in to one method of doing it... executing SQL queries to delete members from the database.

Someone may have already done something like this (there is demand for it) so checking out phpbb.com would not be a bad idea.

Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 8:29 am

You can do a SQL query to delete members from the database, but you may want to try this mod first:

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=117359

I don't know how familiar you are with SQL, but a good query to select a bunch of junk users is:

Code:

select * from phpbb_users where users_posts < 1 and user_id > *number*

users_post < 1 gets most the junk users, but some key users get selected

so

user_id > *number* ensures those key users (such as admin) do not get selected.

**Warning: This code is not tested, I accidently copied over the tested code while it sat in the clipboard **

A couple other suggestions:

Install the spam words mod like we've got here (the mod is uploaded to UCL's server, you can FTP it down. You can also get it from phpbb.com)
ENABLE visual confirmation.
You can also require all users to have email addresses, but I don't know how much good that does. If it's needed the spammers will put something in the email address field.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

A couple other suggestions:

* ENABLE visual confirmation.

That one has virtually stopped the spambots (from 7-12 per day to maybe a couple a week)...

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

I just registered on your forum, one thing that is worth changing... at the moment you can just register and then post straight away. A better option is to have the user to verify that the email address is theirs before they can post. To do this:

Administration Panel > Configuration, and set "Enable account activation" to "User". That way, the user is sent an email link, and they have to click it to verify that account is active.

With that and visual confirmation (which you already have enabled) that should pretty much sort out most of the spam bots Smile