MyBB Community Forums

Hey all

So I recently upgraded to MyBB 1.4 from phpBB stoneage edition, and now I'm being flooded with human spam. I have captcha up, and the messages are reasonably on subject but come from places like India. My messageboard is a college organization (car club) so we don't have any users outside the U.S., and very few outside South Carolina.

Posts typically look like the following (this one from India):

Quote:Hi everyone,

I am crazy about sports cars and this is my first forum entry here.. Since I am new to forum community and I feel I am in midst of my own learning curve. I feel sometimes, that I have to learn a lot, hope you guys have patient on me.Hope to find some new friends on here to chat on some important and informative topics.

They never have any links, but they're annoying nonetheless.. I've banned all Indian IP addresses in .htaccess and that seams to have cut down alot, but some come from elsewhere.

Advice? Thanks in advance.

-Tyler

I have set up email activation, and for some reason, while they do register and get past the random required field, they never activate their account (and therefore cannot post). However, normal users are perfectly capable of activating their accounts (because they actually check their email, probably). I have also prevented the use of a few email servers, though that really is a lackluster solution since one of them is gmail.

I have email activation, they still get through.
Is there a way to ask a question on registration, like what state is this club located in?

Not, by default. There are a few plugins to help with this though (Can't name any though ).

My plugin might help http://mods.mybboard.net/view/stopforums...m-for-mybb it checks all new registrations against the database at www.stopforumspam.com which has 600,000 spammers details or something. It can check their IP, Email and Username.

If a human is registering and even activating the account, then handing it over to a bot, there'll probably never be any way to stop them. Akismet could help but there's the risk of false positives.

Best option is create an allow only website for US IP addresses. Sounds like you don't need or want the international traffic.

Use htaccess and do an allow only.

You can get the output for htaccess here:
http://ipinfodb.com/ip_country_block.php

MattRogowski Wrote:If a human is registering and even activating the account, then handing it over to a bot, there'll probably never be any way to stop them.

Ya you probably hit the nail right on the head Matt!!

Alot of sites im on are being overrun with spam and its sickening!!

Use reCAPTCHA.

Maybe its me,but that post you showed doesn't seem like spam..