PHPBB forum bot spammers and advertising bots.

The first steps in protecting your forums from these pests are to find out how these people are using spamming software to find your forums, believe it or not it's quite easy to locate phpbb forums via the search engines. The spamming bot software finds your forums by searching google and using keywords that can be found on all default installations of PHPbb forum index page's, example: "Powered by phpbb". MSN's search engine has blocked keywords like this recently to prevent forums getting targeted, although other search engines like google still allow it.

Modification Tip #1:
Edit your "overall_footer.php" file found in your templates, subsilver folder and change "Powered by Phpbb..." with something like "Modified by Yourdomain.com". This should stop most people using spamming software actually locating your phpbb forums, this is a start and should keep alot of spam forum posters from actually trying to spam your board.

Modification Tip #2:
Preventing spam bots registering on your forums is a challenge, one simple and effective modification would be to change "Username" on the registration page with "Login ID" and if you have image verification on change "Confirmation code" to something like "Secure Code". This prevents spam bots locating these fields on your forum
and registering there details. Let's face it , the last thing spammers want to do is register by hand on every forum they visit. You will find these values in your phpbb languages folder
and under the name "lang_english.php".

Modification Tip #3:
Try turning on email validation to prevent the same user registering twice and also making the users click the validation link to prove that they are at least 50% human, i say 50% as they may have setup an email for there spam bot software and this may work with there email account to validate automatically every link validation request. More information to be added soon, hope the tips
helped you prevent spam bots so far! .

Please note: I will also install/modify your forums for you on request for a small charge of $15

PM or Email me for requested forum modifications.

*PHPBB3 does not appear to have these problems with bots....*

SO let me take a wild guess here, those littel advertisements that we see swamping certain forums are from bots? I thought people actually posted those. No wonder it be like a million of them in each thread.

100% correct , the majority of the ad's are posted by spam bot's other than google adsense bots. This is why i have made these forums very hard to spam as lots of spammers are aware hehe.

So do you buy software that gets rid of the bots? is there any freeware that allows you to do the same?

It's all freeware and i offer advice to rid forums of spam bots for completely free. It's just a case of modifying the phpbb script and placing your own bits of code and text into it to cause spam bots to get confused and give up on trying.

I've seen the spam elsewhere, but I didn't realize how much bots were involved.

By the way, it's good to see a clean forum without the spam.

Thank you ricardo, i try my best to keep them out

I agree that it is a refreshing change to see a forum so sparkly clean and free of those nasty drug adverts. Honestly, though bots will hit almost any forum software, this type seems to be the worst.

Glad you like it , i am recieving quite a few hits from spammers just you dont see there post's due to a few modifications plus some extra features a few of you have may have accidently stumbled upon already.

Lol indeed! Well, it's working for you, so you've obviously hit the nail on the head.

Is the phpBB modified a lot from the original, or is it mainly tags and so on that you have changed?

The minor changes are the logon fields i have changed the text to prevent spam bot software understanding them.

The major changes would be the bottom of this page "Created by PHPbb team", changing this has prevented alot of spam hits and then using image verification + md5 hash for agreement and checking to see how quickly a registration form is filled in if below a certain time it will prevent registration =)

Most of what you have done I have heard of before, just not the text modification. Really, it makes me wonder what makes these sad individuals write that sort of software doesn't it.

it all comes down to marketing to make money i guess.

I don't have a phpbb forum; I use SMF software. But I didn't know about modifying the footer.

What I do to prevent spam is use captcha plus registrations have to be manually approved.

However, I have a help desk that guests can post at, and now and again spam shows up there. I'll do the footer modification to see if I can stop that.

Good idea, they normally come across your script by using default search words contained within the script.