UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 6 Version 6 Support Overrun by SPAM -- help!!

I have been inundated with poker and prescription spam and am at wit's end. I use UBB Threads 6.2.1 and I have questions on how to deal with this.

1. Requiring registration:
I've gone into "Edit Config settings" and set "Require users to verify their email before account is activated?" to "Yes". Is this the setting for requiring registration?

I do not want to have to approve new users, so I set that to "No".
I also set "Allow users to change their display name?" to "No".
And "Only one username per e-mail address".
Is this all the smart way to do this now?

2. Cleaning up my Board.
Is there a better way than having to go in and delete individual posts...which is driving me CRAZY! There are hundreds now!
Isn't there anyway to search for all posts that say "poker" and delete them then... Or all posts that say "viagra" and delete them.

Please help!!!

Are these posts showing up as anonymous users or registered users? If they are by anonymous you'll want to make sure that all of your forums are set to "read only" for the Guest group. This will require them to register before they can post.

If they are by registered users then you can delete the user and when doing so you'll get the option to delete all of their posts.

Thank you for replying so quickly. They are anonymous. So where do I set Anonymous as read only?

Was I correct in the way I set up my Must Register setting?

That's part of it, that requires them to verify their email before their account is approved. To make sure anonymous is read only you actually have to edit each forum. In there you'll see a list of groups and what permissions they have. This is where you'll set the Guest group to read only.

OK, I understand. But just clarify, is the User category "Guest"" the same as "Anonymous" posters -- IOW, are "Anonymous" posters automatically grouped into the "Guest" user group? Or do I create a new User Group called Anonynmous that automatically grabs all Anonymous Users?

Yes, Guest and Anonymous are the same. So any unregistered user automatically belongs to the "Guest" group, you won't need to create any new groups for this.

Thank you. I just went through and changed my 75 forums! Sorry I didn't do that from Day 1.

So now let's clarify a few other questions:

1. Cleaning up my Board.
Is there a better way than having to go in and delete individual posts...which is driving me CRAZY! There are hundreds now!
Isn't there anyway to search for all posts that say "poker" and delete them "en masse" then.

2. How do I delete a whole User group? I erroneously started setting up the Anonymous User group and now I do not know how to get rid of it. I don't see a delete User group funcionality.

Unfortunately it's going to have to be a one by one thing to delete them when they were made by anonymous users.

In the version you are running there is no way to delete a user group. It won't cause any problems having the group there however. This feature wasn't added until 6.5 I believe as there was no way to delete a group at the time without causing problems.

Thanks again for your help. I think this has helped me improve my boards a lot.

1. Does the one-by-one delete issue change with an upgrade? Or is that always going to be an issue if I allow Anonymous to post?


2. Is there always a message posted that the Administrator deleted a post when I delete a post from a Registered user? Or is this a setting somewhere? Sometimes I want to delete a post and not have a record of it dangling out there -- just raises more discussion.

Hiya,

i know you don't necessarily want user moderation, but somehow combined with the 'Verify' option this is the only way how you can really stem the flood of spam also for registered users. I switched some while ago from a free for all process to full user moderation and since then my boards are clean of spam. With the e-mail verification alone you won't be able to control users that sign quickly a hotmail account up for spamming purposes. Quite often you can already according to the mail address used assume that an account is used by a spammer. My boards deal with depression and i get shed loads of registrations for example with the domain medicinese.info (or something like that it was). A pure online pharmacy spam site. And you can automate this a bit by excluding known spam domains in filters/bademail. My forums policy is straight forward..... somebody pees me of and they are banned for good including full block of their IPs on the firewall. Spammers from the UK have another surprise waiting, they get an invoice of £500 per spam message i have to remove. My latest victim was a school where one pupil thought it is fun to spam my boards with an advert for a gaming site. But as it was a school i was content with an open apology by the head mistress of the school . Sometimes it is a shame that canes aren't allowed anymore

Possibly dumb newbie question, but:

Can I go into the database and delete spammy entries from the Posts table? Or will this screw up other tables?

You may end up with some bad links, for example if they were the last post on the main forum listing, the link would still be to that post until a new post was made. You'd also end up with inaccruate post totals for each forum.