Porn9.org

There's a plugin for phpBB that adds reCaptcha to the registration page. That'll keep the damned spambots from registering. I'm sure you've seen it elsewhere:



It's pretty easy... free registration at reCaptcha.net, and then you simply plug the keys into your Admin panel page. Xrumer (the Russian tool that allows the spammers to break your current registration page) can't bypass it, and ALL new registrations will only be people.

I think that ONE of the versions of IE has problems with it... if someone can't get it to work, they need to (briefly) set porn9.org as 'trusted' in the IE settings 'cos of the off-site <IFRAME>, but the other versions of IE are fine, and no other browsers have any issues with it.

If you don't do it, you'll forever be playing Whack-a-Mole with the fucking spambots.

Merely trying to help, NOT trying to tell you how to run your forum!

You undoubtedly have a bunch of 'em already registered that haven't posted yet. They'll be back. The way some people have that spam tool set up, it'll register a user and then wait for a few weeks, then it'll come back some day and do a bunch of spam posts. The rest of the time, it'll register, come in and put some weird shit in it's profile and then hurriedly post a handful of crap on your forum, all within the space of a few seconds.

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God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen. ~ S. Hawking

Thanks for your help Hoshi, I'll register with recaptcha and install the phpbb plugin for it.

It works for me. We were all scrambling like mad last year when it hit the 'net.

I had to install it on 5 different forums a year ago when that damned spam tool came out. You're just lucky it hadn't found you *yet*. We got hit within the first month of it's release... had quite literally HUNDREDS of bogus registrations within the first few weeks in early Nov '08.

Luckily it's OCR (optical character recognition) is quite poor at the moment, and the Russian hackers that wrote Xrumer haven't figured a way around reCaptcha. They regularly update the spam tool to bypass any of the common captcha add-ons that forums use to try to block automated registrations.

I've seen 3 or 4 forums UTTERLY taken down 'cos the Admins didn't know how to block the spambots. One of 'em they simply shut down forever, another they had to wipe the forum database and start from scratch again, and the others spent two spent weeks removing all of the junk posts. It's freaking annoying as hell until you get it locked down from automated 'bots.

In the year since we've added reCaptcha, we've only had ONE spammer register on any of the 5 forums, and that was a manual registration from China. Both China and Latvia? have spam farms that pay people a few cents each to register on forums, and then the spambots use the registration details to dump junk on your forum. Luckily, those are very few and far between.

I have a tool that I wrote/modified that gives you details on registered users; I'll PM you the link and info on it. It's kinda handy.

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God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen. ~ S. Hawking