Spammers - works hard

[peranders]

http://sjostromaudio.com/phpBB2 (will be removed soon)

A while back I started to get real tired of spammers. I changed to a lovely forum software called Simple Machines Forum which has a nasty function for spammers. They can't write any URL until they are approved AND also the have replied to a confirmation email. A big problem for the spammers is that they have false email adresses so they can't confirm their membership and by that can't write any URL.

If you'll check the members list you can see how many per day that try to spam me. In case you wonder have I have deleted the links from 5 to 34. The links are the usual, "medicin", porn, other products.

Notice the the forum is empty, still the spammers find it worthwhile to register themselves.

Anybody else who have used phpBB and have had spam problems.

In case you wonder, it went very smoothly to convert from phpBB to Simple Machines.

Simple machines has very good tools for administrating the members so it's very easy to catch all unwanted members, zero posters, never onliners etc.

[Geek]

I agree about SMF, it's great! I've been using that ever since I found out what a sour lemon YaBB2 was a year or so back

[lineup]

I too, have used SMF
several times to create forums.

It is a fullfeatured open source forum
by very skilled developers, that has created other forums before ( and learnt howto ).
There are other free bulletin boards that are very fast
( compared to phpBB and vBulletin, which is used by www.diyAudio.com )
but they are a bit stripped down and have those necessary basic features only in default versions.

SMF is very fullfeatured, and yet a really good alternative
to the 2 biggest ones: phpBB (freeware) and vBulletin (commercial).
Besides, Simple Machines Forum has got excellent support!
And is very easy to install and automatically upgrade to new, later versions.

If you want a very fast and good forum you should try punBB.
It was developed to be good working but fast compared to phpBB.
For ultraslim forum, but nice and with possibility to add-ons,
try Vanilla good looking and good working.
DEMO: http://demo.forum-software.org/vanilla/

======================================
Links:
http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php
http://www.simplemachines.org/download/
http://www.punbb.org/downloads.php
http://getvanilla.com/
http://www.vbulletin.com/download.php ( not freeware )

Reviews, ratings and advice on forums software:
http://www.forum-software.org/
SMF review: http://www.forum-software.org/smf/review
Vanilla review: http://www.forum-software.org/vanilla/review


lineup has installed, tested or modified surely like 50 different PHP Forums softwares.
Still not written his totally own forum in programming language php.
But has created several other useful php scripts for websites.

[peranders]

The thread topic was more about the personal nature of the spammers. Since yesterday, I have got a couple more "members".

Maybe we should add that if your webhost has mysql and php it's pretty easy to set up an application based on those to compoents.

Typpical applications are:

Homepage, CMS software http://mamboserver.com I use Mambo for my new homepage.

Forum, see above

Picture gallery http://coppermine-gallery.net/index.php

Calender http://www.easyphpcalendar.com/index.php

Groupware http://phpgroupware.org

Webshop http://oscommerce.com

... and much more. This was only an example.