UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support spam registrations

Really getting tired of spending an hour each morning declining registrations from spammers. Any suggestions other than banning certain email address as the list is getting prohibitive.

Does anyone using threads have this issue? Will I escape it by switching from ubbclassic?

I had been a longtime UBB.Classic user (we've been running it since it where free). We ultimately got bombarded by spambots on a daily basis; we're talking like 300 new spam posts per week, as a base...

Switching to UBB7.0 and we went down to maybe 5 per week... Switching to UBB7.1 and it went down to 0 due to the CAPTCHA capabilities.

I just love the ubbclassic so much. WE've been running it since 1999. In all those years we did not have this problem. I believe we may have been targeted by a disgruntled member who was banned when they made unfriendly attempts to redirect members to their board, dispite the fact that we offered a better free solution for their venture. He may have put the url on some site somewhere as ever since we get these false regs from all over the world and every email address.

One thought I had was to shut off registrations and ask newbies to send an email with their comment or question to qualify them for registration. I'll take a look at ubb7.1, Gizmo, Thanks

I don't think there's any difference between .classic and .threads as far as spam registrations go. If you see a pattern to the ip addresses you can ban from there - most industrious losers with time on their hands can always get a new ip address tho. If it's 1-2 people they get tired eventually and move on.

I think the'd get tired of the CAPTCHA after a while

No, don't feel singled out. It's automated bots that are hammering boards everywhere.

Thank you, Mitch...

Ok, Gizmo, What is CAPTCHA and how does it work? Here is what I find in my cp and how I've set it up. How do these options help or hinder?

CAPTCHA is a feature in Threads, not Classic.

I feel your pain. I run Classic and am manually reviewing all new registrations to avoid the bots.

Bots can get past captcha if it's a good one - captcha is only a deterrent to the colorblind and near-sighted One reason why turning on the referrer check helps as well for threads.

If you are really concerned with bots registering turn on email verification and flood checking. At ubbdev we've been the target of quite a few hack attempts, we've never had a 'bot' register, at least not since flood checking was added way back in the early .classic 6.x series.

This will slow them down alot in your META Tag area of your template section.

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="archive,nofollow">

I guess I did deselect flood protection when some members were having trouble holding onto their posts while spell-checking. Does that make since? Anyway we don't get such complaints anymore.

I'll try that meta tag, Thanks! But on second thought, would that keep google from indexing our forum? That has been a great advantage to us.

For now I'm trying out turning off registrations and using wordlets to put an email link everywhere that registration is addressed with a preset body of the email and notation requesting that newbies include a preferred username along with their first post and I'll set up a profile for them. This can't take as much time as banning several registrations a day; but I must say I haven't had any takers yet since doing this.

be careful publicly posting email addresses; spambots/harvesters will get you

That tag is designed for the bot to archive your forum but not follow all the links to the threads, they do not need to archive every page. Also will stop most dumb bots from registering.

Another good thing about the tag is you will not be lagged out by the bot archiving all your pages and crawling your entire board. If you dont have a large board it is not much of a problem but my one board has 30,000 and up post's and pages.

Hi Lockman,

Where do I find that META Tag area with the template section???
Using UBB Classic (6.7.3) with joy since 2001. But had some problems the last couple weeks with ".ru" spam.
Nothing too serious yet, but I'm affraid it will not stop here.
Maybe can somebody summarize the steps to undertake for a safe environment.

Thx,
Bernez

It's in your headerinsert area of your styles section. Ask again if that's not clear enough

Wouldn't email verification stop spam registrants? No verification of email, no register

Thx Allen,

It's clear enough
When I looked at it in the Style section, I remembered

Thx,
Bernez

allen, bad boy... I can make an email pipe which forwards all email recieved to a php script and use fgetcontents and "approve" it automatically... trust me, it's not that hard lol...

Or you could click the little checkbox in the cp that says
"turn on email verification"

Like i was saying, if you have the knowhow, boredom, and the drive, you could defeat it

It's true, I guess. I've had email verification on from the beginning and registrations still bounce after being accepted.

Still no takers on the email link to register but nice not to have to deal with all the fakes.

Does that flood protection option make a difference for users when taking their time composing a post?

Flood protection only protects from "mass posting", not "turtle posters" hehe

You can also search your members by Birthday.
spambots have been using the birthdate of March 28, 1983
and delete them in one click.

I can see one author of a program setting that as a default for his bots; but I'm sure they'd leave it adjustable for any users, and could mix it up... So I see that it could be a temporary resolve to do that, but you could also be deleting legitimate users or ignoring bots altogethre.

Our registrations have been coming in on the email link but I admit it is a lame fix. Thinking more and more about Threads. I really do like the ranking on google however with Classic. I believe it has boost our site considerably to have so many active pages available for search by keyword. WE have a massive site full of articles but the forum always surfaces ahead of anything else. I'll take a look at that birthday thing. Have learned a lot here.

Moving to threads won't *kill* your google rankings... Threads has redirectors for your ubb.c links, so any incoming hits will redirect to their proper location within threads...

Also there are mods (more specifically, my sitemap addon) which push *all* of your topic links into yahoo and google so their discovery engine is populated with your new install almost immediately (though you'll have to wait to be crawled, it'll help speed it up the best way possible).

Found 60 with that birthday ...out of about 3,000 and most of them I already banned. Thanks Mitel.

Sounds good, Gizmo. Getting prepared mentally...Will start preparing emotionally for the ineveitable.

Kind of wondering if this section is for help relating to classic or reasons why you should get threads?

For many reasons people stay with classic and not move to threads. Like in the Perl language a person can take apart the classic and find holes to mess with your board but in the PHP language not only can someone find holes in the script but also in PHP in general. Another reason is the hustle in some cases with the MySQL Database setups and related stuff.

But I’m sure Gizmo will find some reason that you should get threads and stop worrying about or playing with classic.

There is only so far that support with UBB.C can go; it is EOL, thus is destined to never be updated again; the spam measures IN classic also only go so far...

In my posts I'm providing valid alternatives for items other than saying "well, classic is EOL, you're screwed"; we try to give every method available in classic, then also provide the information in threads that is much more customizable.

BTW, PHP is secure, it's the scripting which can be insecure; if the author doens't know what they're doing, you can lead into many issues; and the sad thing is, most of these issues aren't really that hard of things to patch, however they're found when they're found. Any scripting can have errors or security issues, regardless of the language it was coded in.

Also, threads is faster because of its database; the flatfile ways of UBB.C is what made it slow on larger forums. All of those lookups on flat files led to speed issues and for some it was completely unbearable... With regards to "having to setup a database", most webhosting servers come with some version of MySQL, so it's not generally an issue.

And don't get me wrong, I was with Classic from the beginning; I hated threads, it was an ugly product that wasn't worth my time, and I didn't want to change; however, being in the alpha/beta program a lot of my input (as the other UBB.C users in the beta program) led to more of a comfortable look/feel in threads.

But it seems no matter what I say there will always be someone that will sit and whine about me trying to convert people up to a faster and more reliable product which they already have licensed access to.

Was not a whine just an observation.

Wasn't necessarily saying you where; trust me, read my responses from about a year ago; been getting grief since beta when trying to note people to the new product lol.

Thelockman...thanks, I must say I've felt alone in my love of classic until this thread began to get responses and I do think there has been a fair presentation of options here; but after going to wikipedia.org to compare forums I wondered why everyone seemed to be comparing programs to the UbbClassic: "At one time the hallmark of all message board software."

I'm finding smoother ways of adding a new user every other day through the control panel. It is nice to get a direct email from visitors interested enough in our forum to wait up to a day to be added. I think it is improving the quality of our discussions but, again, when registrations pick up it may be too much of a burden.

I love classic too

.threads will get me there too