robot spam against phpbb forum
My Forum is based on phpbb script. Before I decided to use phpBB, installed other scripts for my forum community space construction. There are other nice programs, but I dediced to use phpBB, because it was easy handling for customization for Japanese language use.
As you see there are few forum members registered. It’s OK, I don’t intend to build a large populated community, and main purpose of my forum is somewhere visitors to my site may post or participate.
Recently, by some spammer using spam robot caused a rush registration with multiple usernames, just to show their spamming websites.
First of all, it is no meaning to register if just wanted to create a link from member profile or member list. Becuase, hyperlink from these pages for websites has ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ tag, to avoid casual judge by search engines’ robots in case some website urls are classified as black hat or malicious url.
This tactics was good, if spammer tried to register once.
However, there were spammy bombing registrations - I would say this kind of spam is almost criminal - , I had to think another protection against spamming.
After reading forum threads where anti-spam methods are discussed, I took one of ideas.
I took “website” off from registration form page. It is very simple, instead of seeking for nice mod and then installing - adjusting it.
[ 2006.12.23 ]
Since above method was not enough against robot spammer, installed a mod mentioned here : to check robot or human, after taken off the link for registration.
