Member Avatar for woocha

Where the hell do these people get lists of all the forums on the Internet? I mean seriously, I have been learning and working very hard on my latest project and people keep going to my site to register and then just add a link to their home page. They never contribute to the forum, they never post or even reply to one stinking thing. I know its human because my forum it behind a human question and captcha....
Does anyone have any suggestions?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by gil857

Dani AI

Generated

This thread shows a classic link-building registration pattern: accounts created only to add a homepage URL and never participate. ’s situation is common and often requires changing the registration/permission flow rather than relying on CAPTCHAs alone.

Practical, low-friction steps that stop most human link-harvesters: remove or hide the public “website/homepage” field on first registration; put website/signature/link privileges behind a trust threshold (for example, require N approved posts or moderator promotion before links are allowed); enable email activation and throttle registrations per IP range. These measures preserve normal signups while removing the immediate payoff for link-only accounts.

Technical/automation options for larger boards: integrate reputation lookups (stopforumspam, Project Honey Pot-style checks), deny disposable-email domains, and flag registrations from suspicious ASNs for manual review rather than outright banning. A targeted check that many admins find effective is auto-scanning a new account’s supplied URL for an immediate backlink to the forum — if present, queue the account for manual approval. Example pattern (illustrative only):

$site = trim($_POST['website'] ?? '');
if ($site) {
  $html = @file_get_contents($site);
  if ($html && stripos($html, 'yourforum.example') !== false) {
    // mark account for manual approval or reject
  }
}

Operational notes and cautions: country-wide blocks are blunt and can block legitimate users; use GeoIP to flag rather than auto-block. Hold a lightweight moderation queue with heuristics (new users + external link + disposable email) to keep admin workload manageable. ’s offer to share a tailored fix privately looks promising for a case-specific patch, and ’s pointer to more comprehensive phpBB anti-spam strategies supports combining short-term UX changes with reputation-based defenses.

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Member Avatar for gil857

woocha,

Do you have a phpbb forum that is getting spammed? If so, look at the spam profile and see if the board language is set to Albanian.

Member Avatar for woocha

I am not sure what you mean by that....

Member Avatar for woocha

To tell you the truth...I posted a similar question on another forum and the people there told me that human spammers (aka: Jack asses) Do a google search for the phrase "powered by phpbb".....Clever little punks. So I guess that's it...you can't remove the "powered by" tag because of copywrite, so I guess I am stuck

Member Avatar for gil857

Sorry, my last post does sound weird. Log in to your phpbb admin panel, under the USER ADMIN section, click on MANAGEMENT and look up the profile and settings of the user that is spamming you. If the board language is set to Albanian, your probably getting spammed by the same person that was spamming my forum.

I was getting about 10-20 fake members a day. No posts, just registering to get a backlink to their site. I tried several fixes, including a pop up window that makes the person registering answer a simple question to proceed to throw off a spambot, but nothing worked. I finally figured that he was either manually creating the ids, or was using software that somehow bypasses the registration page.

I was finally able to fix my spam problem - let my know what you find, if its the same person or software, I think I can help.

Member Avatar for woocha

How did you handle it?

Member Avatar for gil857

Can I send you a PM through Daniweb? I'm afraid the spammer will catch on to the fix. I only have my forum in the signature here on Daniweb and on digital point forums - I think he's picking up his spam list from popular tech forums.

Member Avatar for bobchrist

If these spammers are mostly from specefic country, you can try out by banning particular country IP.

Member Avatar for woocha

  • Can I send you a PM through Daniweb? I'm afraid the spammer will catch on to the fix. I only have my forum in the signature here on Daniweb and on digital point forums - I think he's picking up his spam list from popular tech forums.

Ya shoot me a PM

Member Avatar for bdude

This list has a heap of ways to attack Spam on a phpBB board, helped me when I used to use it.

Member Avatar for gil857

Ya shoot me a PM

Sorry for the delay woocha - just sent you a pm.

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