phpBB Spam Control – phpBB Anti-Spam Options for Fresh Forum Installations

phpBB is pretty much the best php forum software out there that is free, and comes the first choice of many webmasters. However, after a few weeks of first installation, many complain that spam bots start to overwhelm their forums, flooding with automated spam registrations and spam posts.

Unfortunately, that is generally because:

1. phpBB disables account activation by default so that any registered account would be instantly able to write and submit posts.
2. The default image captcha at registration is much too easy for anti-captcha programs to break.

So, taking phpBB 3.0.4 for an example, to prevent the majority of simple phpBB forum spam bots, with every new phpBB installation, you will:

1. Enable registration activation: Administration Control Panel => General => (Board Configuration) User registration settings => (General settings) Account activation => Now select ‘By User‘ from ‘None‘ => Submit.Thereby all new registered accounts will be required to validate the email address which no automated spam bots would do with fabricated ones, at least for not-so-valuable new forums.
2. Use harder captcha images: Administration Control Panel => General => (Board Configuration) Visual confirmation settings => (General options) => GD CAPTCHA foreground noise => Select ‘Yes‘ instead of ‘No‘ => Submit.This would make the captcha a lot harder to break but also less user friendly / accessible because the texts are also much harder for human recognizing. To ease the pain, you may want to set the numeric values just below the option for background noises of x-axis and y-axis higher or zero. I use 200.

After all these efforts you should be receiving much less spam now. If they still laugh at your defense and keep on coming, you should consider using more advanced image captcha such as reCaptcha.net.

For an idea of what captcha works best

Below is a list of famous Chinese websites image captchas that have allegedly been broken by automated text recognition programs with an accuracy percentage and price for each of them. From them you can get an idea of what captcha works the best and what can be easily worked around.

Origin	Samples	Accuracy	Price	Comments
9you		100%	500 $100	Very Easy
tiancity		100%	500 $100	Very Easy
cncard		100%	500 $100	Very Easy
the9		100%	500 $100	Very Easy
the9		99%	1000 $200	Easy
kingsoft		98%	1000 $200	Easy
taobao		95%	1000 $200	Easy
dvbbs		95%	1000 $200	Easy
126		95%	1000 $200	Easy
163		95%	1500 $300	Middle
shanda		90%	1500 $300	Middle
qq		90%	1500 $300	Middle
xiaonei		85%	1000 $200	Middle
sdo		85%	1500 $300	Middle
ourgame		80%	1500 $300	Middle
chinaren		85%	2000 $400	Middle
monter		80%	2000 $400	Middle
baidu		80%	$3000	Difficult
qq		75%	$3000	Difficult
ebay		60%	$4000	Difficult
myspace				30%
google				30%
hotmail				30%
yahoo				45% $8000

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