Why I now avoid some biz content like I avoid p#rn

[Steve MacLellan]

Originally Posted by unpinkpanther

Apart from having humans guard the forum 24/7 looking out for spammers, what other options would you suggest?

I'm using Asgaros Forum for Wordpress on stevemaclellan.net, not PhpBB:
Asgaros Forum: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/asgaros-forum/

However, the PhpBB website has a post to address spam issues:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2284221

Since they wrote the software, and suggest a Q&A CAPTCHA -- this is probably the best choice. So if it were me, I'd give it a try.

[unpinkpanther]

Originally Posted by Steve MacLellan

I'm using Asgaros Forum for Wordpress on stevemaclellan.net, not PhpBB:
Asgaros Forum: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/asgaros-forum/

However, the PhpBB website has a post to address spam issues:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2284221

Since they wrote the software, and suggest a Q&A CAPTCHA -- this is probably the best choice. So if it were me, I'd give it a try.

Thanks for sharing, Steve

Dr Dien, please how soon could you look into this? We need to save SOWPub from pirates...

[Dien Rice]

Hi Unpink (and Steve),

Thanks for your feedback...

This forum uses a customized version of vBulletin (not phpBB)... And we do use Q&A (though I need to update it manually from time to time)... Plus other things I don't like to divulge (so as not to tip off the spammers)...

If you see any spam messages here, you'll see the messages that get through are virtually useless to the spammer. There are no active links, and often brand names (which have spammed before) are "censored out" (replaced with asterisks, "*"), so no-one can read them or even know what they are...

Many spammers hire people at cheap rates to get through "captchas" and so on, so you are often actually dealing with people doing this (not machines)... Though AI (i.e. LLMs) are now getting better and better at getting through anything designed to distinguish machines from humans...

One thing I did (and do) use is blocking certain geographical regions. For example, many years ago we blocked China - and lo and behold, I would say about 80% of the board spam disappeared when we did that! This is much less effective now, because people can (and do) use CloudFlare to make their IP look like their geographical location is in the USA...

Hope that helps!

Best wishes,

Dien

Originally Posted by unpinkpanther

Thanks for sharing, Steve

Dr Dien, please how soon could you look into this? We need to save SOWPub from pirates...

[Dien Rice]

I think we've solved the spam problem... We've added a layer of moderation, so when someone registers, they can't post until their registration is approved...

(This won't affect anyone who is already registered. It only changes things when people first register...)

Someone has created a huge database of email addresses that do "forum spam"... and I've found most of the email addresses that spam here, are listed there! So it's not hard to check...

This is the forum spam site (in case it helps anyone)...

https://www.stopforumspam.com

Best wishes,

Dien