Over the last week, me and many others with phpbb3 forums have been pounded with spam. Same old, trying to sell meds. This is occurring on the registration page and guest chat sections. For registration, they simply put a link to their drug selling site in their profile and never post. In the guest chat section, they write out spam posts.
What’s causing this? A cracked (able to be solved by bots) captcha. Being the geek that I am, I changed the captcha system to something completely different – and the spam dropped dead. I haven’t yet put the new captcha on the registration page, and surprise surprise, I’m still getting spam registrations. This is almost definitely a bot.
Voice your thoughts on this, want a solution? I may give some starting points if I get comments requesting an example. Otherwise, just try out google.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Matt,
I’d be very interested in learning how you changed the phpbb3 captcha system and how difficult the process is. I know a fair bit of PHP, but trying to dig through phpbb3’s code-base has been a bit of a headache. I’d look for the usual mods/ideas on phpbb.com, but they’ve taken the site down due to a recent compromise.
Congrats on stopping the deluge of viagra sign-ups.
Thanks,
Robert
February 5th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Tutorial created. It currently only covers posting a topic as a guest, but tomorrow (2/6/09) I will update the post to add the custom captcha to the registration form.
Enjoy.
February 10th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Yes, I’ve got a phpBB3 forum and was getting hit with spam registrations. I went for a slightly different tack after reading a couple of articles about defeating the captcha. It seems to be working at the moment. I’ve put a quick hack into the captcha code to base the image on a reasonably bland photographic background, in my case, some trees. It’s predominantly green, but wouldn’t support a basic flood fill which seems to be the basis of the method used to determine the captcha.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:05 am
phpBB3 captcha was defeated by the bots some time ago.
There is a nice mod for phpBB3 that allows you to drop in ReCAPTCHA (www.recaptcha.net) which is about as bot-proof a Captcha as you’re ever likely to see. The mod is here :
http://groups.google.com/group/recaptcha/browse_thread/thread/2adc4dd06c08db50/0fad525350639215
You do need to be a fairly confident PHP programmer to apply this mod but trust me, it will kill bot registrations stone dead.
August 16th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Hi there ,
Greatly looking to learning more in your forum.
Talk to you soon
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August 18th, 2010 at 12:04 am
Terrific, that\’ s exactly what I was seeking for! You just spared me alot of work
September 3rd, 2010 at 4:28 am
Hi there,
This is my first time here so I\’m just writing a quick post to say hi. Hopefully there\’s some good discussions here – looks okay so far. lol, that\’s really all I got.