UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Version 7/8 Support Preventing Spam?

I changed the registration settings to enable CAPTCHA image verification from new members. I also enabled email verification.

I'm wondering if there's anything else that i shouold do.

Calm before the storm

We just updated from 6.2 to 7.5. And it's my understanding that the webcrawlers/search engines have not yet loaded our site pages in to their cache. Hence we're not really getting much traffic yet. But i understand that will likely change real fast.

Am i right?

Currently we don't really have many mods -- just two part-timers. And i might ask two of our regulars to step up and help -- ask them to become mods.

I see that i have the option to disallow those with yahoo and/or hotmail accounts but i've not opted for that.

People have suggested that our forum requires a small charitable donation from new registrants. This was suggested to prevent spammers and others w/ malicious intent. To me this appears to be a bit extreme as it might also deter good people who don't want the hassle of transferring $$.

Any thoughts?

Again, thanks for all of your help. I believe that this transition will be very good once everyone on our forum is used to it.

I manually approve all registrants myself. I run their email addresses through Google to see if the email address is in use on other forums or whatever. I also use

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

and run their IP addresses, email addresses, and usernames if I don't see anything on Google. So far, I have been successful using this approach. It takes a little time - I usually get 20-30 new registrations a day.

I would not use the "pay to play" option for registration. It can scare good people away.

No one wants to pay for anything on the internet, the standard attitude is that they pay to get online so everything online should be free no matter what.

Well, coming from previous versions there are a few things you can do to help your SE traffic; you can install the redirectors that came with the import scripts, and you can install a sitemap script to "feed" the new URLs to search engines directly so that you can aid their discovery bots (spiders) in learning where new URLs exist.

Thanks guys.