[ Tutorial ] Anti Spam phpBB forum

Got a phpBB forum?
Got a phpBB forum at war with spam bots?

Well you came to the right place.

If you have the 'stupid admin theory' I suggest you loose it.
The admin theory is...

"ignore the problem and it'll go away"

As if that will work?

Spammers want it big time, and they will stop at nothing.

Now you want to block these IP's don't you? Well instead of adding each individual IP, add this updated pack of IP's.

IP Blacklist (Updated July 2007): Click here!

Thanks to sumbit.com the anti spam organization for that file.

Some tips by sumbit...

1. Enable your forums Captcha -Turn on your captcha in your ACP, most bots work around this, but it may help eliminate a small percentage of older bots.
2. Enable "Account Activation" (via the users email) - Using the Admin activation may eliminate spam however in the end it will be just as much work as deleting spam and your forums activity will most likely suffer as most users sign up because they wish to immediately and impulsively reply to something they've read... If you enable their account manually at a later time, they may not return.
3. Hide from spammers - Make it harder for spammers to find you, without sacrificing surfers being able to find you:
1. Do not use /phpBB2/ as a forum location. - If your boards address is sitename.com/phpBB move your board to another address such as sitename.com/forum. - This takes less than 30 seconds to do (with the exception of changing links on any HTML pages and emailing your members about the change.
2. Remove phpBB text - Remove the "Powered by phpBB 2.0.21 © 2001 phpBB Group" and replace it with an image of the text (so SE's do not pick up on the "phpbb"
3. Use Robots.txt to block SE's from indexing non vital areas of your forum. If your forum url is http://yoursitename.com/widgets create a text file and place the following in it (substituting widgets with the forums location, name it robots.txt and upload it to http://yoursitename.com/robots.txt )

They also have put together a robots.txt. Which I will display below, it is a simple file, also used by many games to protect access of the history, spammers use this history tracking to go back before you installed the IP update so they can spam again. But adding this file the day you install the forum, will prevent them from back tracking!

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/profile
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/groupcp
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/memberlist
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/post-
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/posting
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/search
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/updates-topic
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/stop-updates-topic
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/ptopic
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/ntopic
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/profile
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/groupcp
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/login
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/modcp
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/privmsg
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/memberlist
Disallow: /forum(change this if you have to)/mark-forum

Obviously delete the brackets and change the forum slash folder thingy if you have to. So, instructions;

1.) Copy this into notepad.
2.) Change the slash folder thingy.
3.) Save as robots.txt
4.) Upload into http://yoursitename.com/robots.txt

Voila! Saved!

Special Thanks to SumBit.com the anti-spam project.

Dazzozo.

[Large Quote Removed]

Small typo in the robots.txt.
The first line should read:

User-agent: *

Very true! Thanks for that! Much appreciated, I had it all in notepad and I obviously didn't copy the first 2 letters. Thanks.

Lol.
I left a forum going, when I abandoned it.
Check out the guests forum on this:
[Link Removed, Innapropriate Content]
Eamped was so rubbish.
This was back in June/July.