Errors

So everyone from Australia who joins is a spammer? Or just most of them?

No. everyone who seems to register between the hours of 130am- and 8am ( when they see i am not logged in) are spammers.

If even one of them is not it would have the occurrence of once in 20-30 days.

I don’t know where they come from but many of them use Yahoo.co.uk.

It doesn’t even matter because the site is not going to limit hours to join. I just have to keep exterminating them as they appear.

IL, have you been deleting posts on this thread?
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=18879.new#new

About 3 pages have disappeared.

IL, you could just never log out(like me) and then you’ll always seem to be online. Since no one knows which time zone you live in, they won’t know if you’re actually at the computer or not.

I can’t keep my computers on all day and night. Thats just not practical.

@Imperious:

I can’t keep my computers on all day and night. Thats just not practical.

No, you don’t have to keep the computer on. Just choose “forever” for how long you log in and never log out. Even if you turn off your computer and turn it back on,you’ll still be logged in.

No it doesn’t work that way. Stay logged in forever means anytime you visit the site with the same IP address, you never need to type anything to log in.

It does not mean your on the site when you are not.

LMFAO! thats a funny one

@Imperious:

No it doesn’t work that way. Stay logged in forever means anytime you visit the site with the same IP address, you never need to type anything to log in.

It does not mean your on the site when you are not.

LMFAO! thats a funny one

Yes, that’s what happens. When I shut down my computer at 10:00 PM Pacific time, does my online status disappear even though I never logged out?

Yes, when you leave the site you are no longer “online”

You are only online when you have a screen up of some part of the site.

Look up total time logged in for further details.

How to stop the members list from displaying.  Add this to index.php at the top of the script:

if ($_GET[‘action’])==‘mlist’) exit;

This destroys one of their larger incentives to register. So if they are slightly intelligent people behind this, they should figure it out and stop registering.

You could also remove all urls from people’s profiles. Or add the “nofollow” tag to them so they don’t get any search engine benefits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

(People can still post spam urls, but that is more work.  And in my limited experience the spammers generally stuck with spamming the members list and not doing posts.).

Why would they post websites in the members list if no one will see the sites and go to them?

The main goal of spammers it to post links to improve website rankings in search engines. This happens even if nobody clicks on the links.  Google, Yahoo, and other search engines have bots that visit almost every page on your website.  When these search engines see a link to another website they count it as a “vote” in favor of that website and boost its ranking (unless they find the link on a website that is totally spam - in which case the link might be counted against you, but as this is a quality website any link from it is golden!).

You could also tell all the bots not to visit the memberslist page (with a robots.txt file).  However that will be less obvious for the spammers.

I think the downtime is regularly causing email notifications when someone responds to your thread to not get sent.

You could run a query to set the website to ‘’ for everyone that has zero posts.  That’d be a good way of getting rid of all the existing spam links.

It takes like 15 minutes just to kill 10 of them. This site has thousands of zero post counts and i don’t have that kind of time.

I can only clear the daily idiot spammers off the site.

Email authentication is on, it doesn’t help. Not allowing links in member profiles is also no an option in SMF.

I tried installing an Akismet (anti-spam) plugin for SMF but then posting would time out. Why? I don’t know. Nearly all Wordpress sites on the internet use Akismet and I’ve never seen an issue where it take 5 minutes to post something.

Both phpBB and SMF are pieces of shit software. Look how you install so called “modules” you have to manually edit code core to the system or you run a patch that does the same thing. It’s garbage and unmaintainable. At least with Phorum, modules are modules, like they are in Wordpress.

I’ve made the first step toward moving to Phorum, it is installed. Next step is look an feel. After that I need a user and post migration script. After that I could launch but the dice roller won’t be ready.

@akreider2:

That is weird. I’m familiar with phpbb2.   I didn’t bother banning people, I just didn’t let them link to their website until they had posted.  Do you have email authentication on?  That helps.

Unfortunately the evil spammers employ real people. So even a good captcha will only get you so far.  Do you have one?

Captchas have been getting really hard to decipher recently, even if you are a real person.

On my blog I don’t approve users unless they manually email me.  Depending on how much traffic you get, that might be less work.

Both phpBB and SMF are pieces of sh*t software

100% True.