www.forum.spam.org

[bbadm]

I have had terrible problems with forum spam and is ruining my forum. Most of my time is spent deleting spam and bad users. What steps can I take? I am using a recent version of PHPBB, similar to what you have here.

[spamorg]

Here's the short answer, and a few links to where you can find more info:

phpbb is now in an upper version 2, actually version 2.0.22. Forum spam has become a huge problem recently, particularly in phpbb. Because of so many installations worldwide, they are an easy target for automated BOTs which are set up to register and post automatically.

Because version 3 is in Beta version, and about to come out in a stable user version, the powers that be at phpbb have decided that no major upgrades will be made to the forum software, except for security reasons, and they have decided that spam problems are not considered a security issue. Many users disagree with this decision, and many forums have been rendered virtually unusable and not worth the maintainance cost, in time, from forum spam.

The solution, until version 3 is officially released, is to install a modification to the forum software. See the link below for some very useful info on anti-spam mods:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=393503&highlight=antispam+acp

Installing a mod like Anti-Spam ACP from http://www.lithiumstudios.org/
will give you a suite of tools which automate anti-spaming tasks which in the original forum software are very time consuming. In addition, there is a more robust registration scenario, which tends to catch all the automated Bot sign-ups. In my tests it has eliminated 99% of phpbb forum spam.

[Rommidze]

I have just filled an article at my blog about some tricks against forum spam, wich works well for me. Most of these tips are not visible and do not disturb a real users, but well disords a spammers.

[D.estag]

I voted yes. The amount of spam is a huge turnoff to the site. even getting some more moderators and just deleting it all would probably work as well.

[laura12]

Spamming can be avoided by allowing signature length to be 255 characters.

[stephenxanders]

If you want to lessen the number of spammers in your site, try removing the signature form.. for sure people would not bother visit your forum again

SPAMMERS are just after backlinks, so once you removed that, they'll not want to visit your site again

[steveg]

There is a program calle XRumer specifically designed to post forum spam. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

There is info in that wikipedia article about helping prevent damage from that source.

[markcasias]

to avoid the forum from spammers try to monitor the new post messages and not to allowed anchor text.

cheer,
mark

[jorosh20]

SPAMMERS are just after backlinks,all you need to do is to remove it and you will not see it again.

[ChadHisman]

Here's a few ways to combat spam.

Personally approve each member and on the signup form ask them why they want to join your forum.

Review each post before it goes live.

Allow members to be moderators and when a post gets a few reports as spam it gets deleted.

That's what I can think of.

[spamorg]

This works, but is more work for the moderators. The bst solution is an automated one, though that is always at risk of corruption and abuse.