[WARNING] Potential Deep techie stuff[/WARNING]

Cool Security Check I just entered www.twincitiescarry.com/forum and it looks like a level six.

I was curious what the admins have installed to fight bot submitted spam? I know there is image verification by typing in a text field what we see in an image at registration. I have done some research and found a few interesting threads on the phpBB.com forum and a few other websites. What version of phpbb runs this forum?

Fight the Spam registration bots - long thread, but it looks like there are a few plugins that can be used and a few php hacks that can be implemented.

Looks like a good recipe of mods and hacks for spam This guy seems to have figured a lot out with his personal phpbb implementations.

Good looking spam protection technique Just a few hacks to some php files and spam stoppage. I have always wondered why a delay isn't added to all user submit forms. Bot break real quick when there is a delay.

Sorry if this is a little deep. I just thought I would try and help out since there has been an influx of spammers. A lot of the above fixes/hacks will not work if it is a "legit" person logging in to submit spam. You can remove the signature box from the registration page or not allow url's till there have been so many posts(like 3-5). That would slow down breathing "bottom feeder" spammers. Just my $.02

Do you have both the time and the geek points to implement these hacks? (Right now, of the admins -- as opposed to the moderators -- I don't know if we have anybody who qualifies as to both.)

Right now, we're several releases behind the current version of PHPBB; nobody's had both time and geek points necessary to upgrade to the present version without breaking the present mods.

Time: Depends if I am procrastinating for my MBA (just like I have been all morning)

Geek points: Sure thing. Haven't worked with phpbb too much but is has to be simular to Wordpress or Xoops CMS i would think since they deal with php.

The php hacks could be implemented pretty easily. We would want to upgrade to the latest version of phpbb first. There may be fixes already implemented in the base code for some of the mentioned hacks I have found.

I nominate Brauchma for the "Geek 1st class" award............now get busy
It would be nice to filter out some of the crap that comes through here.

Another thing that can be done is to encode all email addresses, such as:

http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html

Except a routine can be added that on the 'submit' event, the string is parsed and when email addresses or whatever are detected, the normal letters are replaced with hex or whatever you want.

In .NET there are a lot of built-in classes that can do this automatically, but I'm guessing you are on PHP, with mySQL running on either Linux or UNIX ... and best of luck to ya fer' that

Good in theory. More sophisticated spiders read the rendered html, not the source, so it's not a panacea.

I may be cruel, but anyone who uses the Interweb should KNOW that posting email addresses is a bad idea.

is to refuse of allow any ketchup in the same website, so the spammer will have to try and serve the spam strainght up with NOTHING to kill off the taste... NOBODY will go near Spam without some sort of condiment!!

Friggin Vikings do............
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7YedEopp4