Forums

We need a Spam page on the wiki, since it's a much asked for topic.

I just don't know where to add it, can one of the devs add the page where they would like to see it and we can add content?

Gil, for now you can use Connor's User Management plugin on the PunBB.org downloads page. It works fine on FluxBB 1.2.23, which is the version I run at hcgtv.net. That particular plugin and Connor's Forum Cleanup plugin are prime candidates to be brought over to FluxBB and checked against 1.4.2.

With the help of the User Management plugin, that I run every morning, I've trimmed down number of users from over 25,000 to just 179 in a few days.
My parameters, from the rules page:
4. Any email registrations not confirmed within 24 hours will have their user profile deleted.
5. Should you confirm your email, but fail to post within 7 days, your user profile will get deleted.

Once I'm comfortable that using the above parameters are having an effect, I'll copy out the appropriate lines from the User Management plugin and create a standalone php file, with hardcoded parameters, that I can call from a daily cron job.

These are the top 10 countries hitting hcgtv.net: United States, Israel, China, India, Poland, Russian Federation, Pakistan, Germany, Greece, Philippines. Next up, I'm thinking of selectively excluding a country at a time from registering to see what effect it has, just curious where the majority of the human spammers are coming from.

There's a lot of Pun/Flux forums out there with 1,000's of users that can be trimmed. Yeah it might look great that your forum has 15,000 members, but unless you plan on being the next Facebook, you're leaving open spam holes where a user that looked benign one day, decides to sign back on and change his or her signature or website link to point to fake Gucci bags.

Personally, I'm tired of people that rather than contribute to the Net, are just using it peddle their wares or to game search rankings. Many years ago, I disabled commenting on all my sites, it became a nightmare to manage, since I moderated each and every comment.

Windows greets me in the morning with an assuring female voice telling me that my anti-virus has been updated. Our web-apps should give us the same feeling, that they're looking out for us, protecting us, female voice optional.

With measures in place, from a default install, over time the registrations should ease up. At this point they just register out of habit, since they don't realize it will make no sense at all on the latest FluxBB 1.4.2.

Some more ideas:
* Have an option to not show users with 0 posts in the user list.
* User management plugin by Connor shipped as default, it's what I've been using to trim out users that never confirm their registrations (over 11,000 deleted by this plugin at hcgtv.net).
* These two threads at phpBB offer more measures they've implemented, from 2006 and 2009.

I think it's about making it not worth it to register anymore. As for those that think that captchas will make it hard for those with disabilities to register, well you can use Flite to read them the generated text. Flite is installed at Dreamhost, my hosting provider, so it should be on others, if not, then just ask for it.

What I would like to see are various options for the admin to chose from, like quy mentions, there's also textcaptcha. One of the nicer spam solutions in a forum is the spam_hurdles module from Phorum. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel, Rickard knew that, here too, and here.

After all, it's about collectively fighting these bots and human spammers. Let the spammers go find another open forum to pick on, they'll end up seeing what FluxBB did and the cycle will get repeated. Eventually, like the fiasco that was trackbacks, bots and spammers will just have to find somewhere else to peddle their wares.

That did it, thanks Paul.

Hey Insert,

When I was using Nucleus CMS, we worked on a plugin to integrate with PunBB.

NP_PunBB plugin features:
* Adds all Nucleus users, items and comments from the plugin options screen.
* Adds new Nucleus user to PunBB from the createaccount.html process.
* Adds new Nucleus items to PunBB topics, can be toggled per post.
* Template var link to forum topic, with number of replies at the forum.
* Category option to map categories to forums, click edit next to category.

With the plugin I would create a story on the front page and hand over commenting to the forum. Since it read the replies from the forum, you could display comments(23) in the story's footer. Whatever category you gave the story, it would be routed to the appropriate forum.

The code could be used as the basis for a Wordpress plugin.

That's strange, could it be a cache or cookie issue? What browser and operating system do you use?

I've tested it on Windows XP(Firefox, Opera, IE8) and Linux(Firefox).

The FluxBB 1.4.2 Xref is up.

Love cross referencing small code projects, keeps my processor from overheating

Edit: Forgot to mention that a file called pax_global_header made it into the distribution.

Had I read that thread, which I just did, I wouldn't of made the original post on this thread.

I understand all the arguments, but other forums have measures shipped with core, and they are quite effective. Maybe Pun/Flux has been getting targeted because there is no default protection, while other forums ship with something that the admin can turn on. In other words, it's a free for all.

I'm not going to name a competitor, but I admin a forum for another project, it ships with anti-bot and ant-spam as a module. When I installed said forum, 2 and 1/2 years ago, I enabled the module. There is next to nothing as far as bots signing up, and I got my first admin email the other day notifying me of a spam message by a concerned user.

Measures may work or not, but what really works is that sign in the front of the house proclaiming that a security alarm is in place, even if it's bullshit.