Spammers!!! Uck!

[moviesgamesetc]

Why are we suddenly getting so many spammers cluttering up our wonderful dicsussion board and what can we do about it?  8O

[Hardcopy]

They have just caught up with me. I had a small board hooked up to Sci Fi Log that had about 8 registered users. I abandoned it because of spammers and put up a new one at a new url. I left the old one there just not linked. It has got 272 users now all but 8 are spammers and a ton of spam posts.

Problem is that the cure is a lot of pain. Basically I have to redo the entire site and change it from this software to another, or write my own from scratch. Either way it is maybe a week or more of hard work on me. Then I have to convert over the intranet, the rental guide, the demographics, etc.

I am sure the spammers will force me to do it sooner rather than later, I am hoping to put it off till after the holidays so I have some time to pay attention to what I am doing.

[nerothehero]

anyway to put a function on the site for use to mark posts as spam?
anything we can do to help we will,  I hope I speak for the regular users on here as well.

[moviesgamesetc]

Boy that sounds like a lot of work! I don't blame you for not wanting to deal with it until after the holidays.
With how picky my computer is I might not even be able to access the site if something changes.
Maybe if we ignore them they will go away.
Anything we can do otherwise?

[Hardcopy]

Not really, they are pretty obvious about it, just have to wait for me to click on it and click on the X and delete it. Doesn't hurt anything really.

What they are doing is putting links in that google will collect and raise their Page Ranking. Google will put higher ranked pages up nearer the first search. So if they are linked off of 1000000000000000000000 message boards their ranking goes up when you search for Viagra or what ever they are pushing.

[wevie]

I go to a Miami Dolphins website and what they do is not allow anyone with ten posts or less to post a link of any kind.  Why not try that and that will put a stop to all of them I think.

[Hardcopy]

Didn't u see that spammer earlier this week or last? Posted like a dozen individual posts all of which were pure crap.

They will get around that. PHPBB is just too well known and too easy for them to get around. In the past couple months I have gone through a LOT of anti spam workarounds and they all ultimately fail. I am thinking of trying another forum software after the holidays.

[wevie]

That is true.  What if you had to gratnt permission before someone posted a link?  Would that be too much trouble?

[tonypotenza]

if you have less than 50 posts, you can't posts ROFL