MyBB Community Forums

Albeit I'm new here but I'm not a newbie. Been reading through some of the threads in this section. While blocking Countries or IP blocks may seem like a great idea, it can become a nightmare which does little to stop anyone using a proxy or worse case scenario, botnets.

Spammers are smart these days and use automated registration tools, most come with additional tools to crack captcha. Albeit you can limit the attempts but they could easily cycle through 1000's of ips.

But why even give these scum bags access to your code and content?

I have a lot WP sites and was using Country blocking and all sorts of wild and wonderful tricks in htaccess to keep the scum out. But, it was always a task of continued tweaking. Agreed there is nothing that's 100% secure - if someone is skilled enough and they wont to gain access or deface your site they will.

Thing is, your best line of defence is to make it so hard that 99.9% of those trying to gain access to spam or what not, give up and move onto a softer target.

I've been using Zbblock (totally free) for the past 14 months and it has kept all the scum out. This includes script kiddies, spammers, misbehaving bots etc etc. SE's like baidu and fake Google bots et al are no match for zbblock.

What's really ideal about this security script, it loads 1'st up and is called from a simple include file, located in the first php file to load. Which means, anything that's hitting your site for dubious purposes is blocked at the front gate; they don't get 1 line of your code or content.

I've used cloudfare but I think this is far better.

PS Questions are great for bots but not human spammers.

And unfortunately the last update of zbblock was over 6 months ago; I assume this is already been bypassed.

It's important to remember that security is a process, not a product. While ZB Block claims to "Stop MySQL database injection and tampering" and "Strengthen your site against defacement", that pretty much translates to "We'll protect the insecure and crappy software you're running". But even that isn't a complete guarantee. It's probably more overhead than you need; it's more likely going to be another weakness (password security, compromised workstation, etc) which will get you. There are many standard security practices out there which need to be followed to ensure that if you are a target, you're not going to be an easy one.