Spam

[Rebecka Fan]

Wow! The whole of "New Posts" is filled with Spam! Never seen so much!

[fish]

I've just sent a pm to Oeb, with a copy for Ian to read when he gets his internet connection back, asking him to help clear away some of the muck. Hopefully he'll see the message in time to help 'cause it's horrible at the moment, isn't it?

When I logged on a few minutes ago there were another three easily identified spammers logged on at the same time.

[oeb]

I'll do some clean-up and change the board settings so new members have to be approved manually. The automated security features of phpBB are clearly not enough...

[oeb]

Now all the spam should be gone. I also deleted all inactive users (i.e. "sleeping" spambots) and enabled manual user activation.

[Ian]

That's excellent, Oeb.

I am back online, thank heavens.

[Ian]

Um, it doesn't appear to be stopping them.

[fish]

I did notice than one of them had the good manners to put his spam in a topic called "spam".

[Ian]

I'm not sure if it was good taste or just cheek.

[oeb]

There are still lots of previously registered inactive spam-bots that might "wake up" unfortunately. I believe there used to be an an easy way to delete all members with 0 posts, I will look into that.
Also, the anti-spambot features of phpBB are not working at all, the current version at least. The captcha image shown is now almost impossible to read by humans, but I still get flooded with automated user registrations each day. I think I have to temporary disable new user registrations and instruct people to send an e-mail if they want to register (anyone can read the forum, you only need to register to submit posts).

[Ian]

Probably not a bad idea, Oeb.

Sad that you have to go to those extremes to keep the buggers out, though.

[oeb]

This is now done and I've also deleted all members with zero posts to clean up the members list.

[Ian]

Great stuff, Oeb.

[fish]

Great stuff, Oeb.

Much appreciated. Thanks.