Technical Inquiry About MyBB Forums

[Ares Johnson]

Question for somebody who knows enough about running a MyBB forum, not just moderating one. How does one configure things to avoid obvious wannabe-spammers from ever registering? I set up my own forum awhile ago out of curiosity, it's not meant for much use yet, but I'm getting kind of annoyed having to delete dozens of nonsensically-named bot users every week. I had to switch all user accounts to Admin-activation to avoid the whole thing filling up with spam.

What does this forum do to avoid this? I've seen no sign of such difficulties. I've looked up some info, but not had much luck.

[stevebowers]

We had a lot of trouble in the early days. Then Graham (if I recall correctly) found a way of removing spam applications. I believe it is a clever captcha system and a question or two, a mini-Turing test.

[Drashner1]

IIRC, the forum now asks any new user a few questions about the OA main page (mental note: we will need to update that when we finally replace the OA home page) as a condition of applying for membership. We also manually approve all new applications and use the Stop Forum Spam webpage:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

to run a check on their IP Address (which you can access from the forum Admin screens) before approving the application.

Taken together, it seems to be working pretty well, after a bit of fine tuning.

Graham hasn't really been active on the forum lately, but you could probably reach out to him directly via PM or the like and he might be able to provide more specific details about exactly what he set up on the forum side.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[Matterplay1]

IIRC, the forum now asks any new user a few questions about the OA main page (mental note: we will need to update that when we finally replace the OA home page) as a condition of applying for membership. We also manually approve all new applications and use the Stop Forum Spam webpage:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

to run a check on their IP Address (which you can access from the forum Admin screens) before approving the application.

Taken together, it seems to be working pretty well, after a bit of fine tuning.

Graham hasn't really been active on the forum lately, but you could probably reach out to him directly via PM or the like and he might be able to provide more specific details about exactly what he set up on the forum side.

Further to that, I was the one who set up the questions. I found that they needed to be tuned to something a bot could not figure out, and that bots are not as 'simple-minded' as one might think. At one stage about a year ago they suddenly started blowing past the measures we first set up, including the usual things you see on the web that try to determine whether a real human is signing on. After some tweaks, that stopped, but even now I usually check the IP address of the new members to see if they're legit. If there's a sudden spate of 'new members' from China or eastern Europe, or a couple of specific locales in Kansas or California, then it's a sign the bots have found another hole in the fence...

PM or e-mail me for more details if you need them.