PHP Bulletin board. Anyone good at working with it?

[Joeaksa]

Anyone here good with PHP bulletin board? I run one for antique airplanes and its doing fine but have not done the last couple of upgrades and we need to do something to increase security on the board. Getting too many spammers registering.

If someone knows what they are doing with it, am willing to hire them for help with an upgrade.

Thx,

Joe A

[Brando]

The best way to prevent that is human verification - captcha or recaptcha. Or, go back to manual user acct activation.

Which PHP forum software are you using?

[Joeaksa]

Am using 3.0.5 right now and the newest is 3.0.11. We usually do not make or do every upgrade but its been a while now and time to do it.

We are doing the "manual account activation" right now but whats kicking my rear is all of these spammers registering and my having to delete them. Its usually a good 2-300 per day and when I do not do it every morning I return from a week out on the road to find 21 pages at 100 per page and that gets a bit tiring. I delete them 100 per swipe but still would hope to find a way to knock it down a bit.

The spammers are from around the world, most in Russia or Eastern Europe but loads in India and so on...

Do you have any experience with the PHP system?

Thx,

Joe

[Scott R]

Originally Posted by Joeaksa

Am using 3.0.5 right now and the newest is 3.0.11. We usually do not make or do every upgrade but its been a while now and time to do it.

We are doing the "manual account activation" right now but whats kicking my rear is all of these spammers registering and my having to delete them. Its usually a good 2-300 per day and when I do not do it every morning I return from a week out on the road to find 21 pages at 100 per page and that gets a bit tiring. I delete them 100 per swipe but still would hope to find a way to knock it down a bit.

The spammers are from around the world, most in Russia or Eastern Europe but loads in India and so on...

Do you have any experience with the PHP system?

Thx,

Joe

Are you using VBB, or Huddler, or something else?

[Brando]

It depends on which PHP bulletin board system you are using. vBulletin (this forum) has a PHP version, there's phpBB, Invision Power Board, PHPNuke has one built in. Some have the ability for you to load "plugins" - one of which would be CAPTCHA or CAPTCHA-like integration. Basically it sets a session cookie and an image output. The really good ones detect by region or user-agent to prevent a bot from just reading the cookie data and submitting that.

If you tell us what bulletin board software you are using, we may be able to guide you to a solution.

[Joeaksa]

Guess I am not understanding the question.

I am using PHP BB version 3.0.5. Thats the name and version of the bulletin board I am using. Have no idea what VBB or Huddler is...

This is where it comes from: www.phpbb.com

More info on the bulletin board here: phpBB - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It does seem that it does have CAPTCHA in the newer versions, so even more reason for us to upgrade.

[slodave]

Joe, this site (PP) uses VBB aka vBulletin.

[Joeaksa]

Dave,

Thanks and totally different type of bulletin board.

[Brando]

Joeska, you may want to install the latest version of your forum. It appears a number of anti-spam and anti-bot measures came with version 3.0.6. The most successful method of deterring bots on older installs is a custom-validation drop-down or custom profile field selection. I'm not sure on the functionality but an upgrade and enabling the CAPTCHA or Q+A feature may be your best route here.

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/sortables_captcha_plugin/

There is also this one that is built into phpBB 3.0.6 or greater.

https://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/how-to-configure-q+a-captcha/

[Joeaksa]

Brando,

Thanks and thats what I want to do, was just wondering if anyone here had any experience with this type of board.

Guess I am doing it myself now...

Thx,

Joe

[cashflyer]

Joe - do you have members in Asia, Russia, etc?
If not, ban entire blocks of IP addresses. That's what we did on our sportscar club's site. (Of course, then you cannot access the site when you are in Russia.)

[Joeaksa]

Harvey,

Good point! We have a few members in the UK, few in Germany and two in Switzerland. Thats it, the rest are in N. America and Oz.

Let me give that a try!

Have not traveled to Russia or the satellite countries in 2-3 years, so not a factor. Trying to stick to CONUS for now.

Thx, Joe

[Brando]

PM sent.

[Joeaksa]

Brando,

Just replied to your PM.

Thanks, Joe