Private Message Spam

[mikelove]

Apologies to anyone who received a message from "joylili" - we'd forgotten to turn on the don't-allow-PMing-more-than-one-recipient at once feature when we last updated our forum software. (but have now done so)

 

[mikelove]

And now they're at it again under a different name - I've temporarily disabled private messaging altogether until we manage to hunt down whoever this %&$)(*&@*$&()$$ is who keeps spamming everyone.

 

[sdl]

Mike, I administer several boards with the latest (3.02) version of phpBB, and had the same problem on two of them. We were autobot spammer free until just a few weeks ago. Now some spammers have finally learned how to autoregister in the front door, and it was definitely were the work of bots, and not live person registrations. Last week I enabled GD CAPTCHA, (ACP --> Board Configuration --> Visual confirmation settings), set the x and y axis noise to 20 (still readable, but very hard for bots to crack), and we haven't had any spammer signups since.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the tip. We try to keep the captcha from being too aggressive, since we've gotten a surprisingly large number of e-mails from people unable to register whenever we've turned it up, but given the recent rise in the number of bot spammers we may have to bite the bullet and turn it up again. Once we get around to linking forum accounts to My Orders accounts this will get a lot easier, since we can then make registration painless for people who own copies of Pleco (making the reasonable assumption that no spammer would go the trouble of buying a copy of Pleco, even with a stolen credit card, just for the privilege of spamming our discussion forum) and as painful as it needs to be for unknown / potentially-spamming users.